I was sixteen, of the age when fear aroused inspiration, so I turned on the light, dug up a brand-new moleskin journal from my suitcase—the drums still summoning the vast forces of darkness—and wrote on the first page
Kinshasa 7.7.1983
The opening scene of the novel situates that the narrator as a young writer. The stories spread across this unified collection will reveal the evolution of the teen diarist into a young writer. The reference to Kinshasa ties to an opening line allusion to Heart of Darkness; a title which becomes a kind of thematic overlay to the narrative progression.
I felt the intense pleasure of giving up, the expansive freedom of utter defeat.
This philosophical statement of release occurs when the narrator and a famous Bosnian writer stumble into an alley, drunk and entranced by the sight of a woman with a long braid and a glass of wine dances alone inside her house. They are ankle-deep in snow and, lacking the capacity to move forward or backward, make the decision to sit and watch. It is in the watching, in the sublime perfection of a moment which could never be recaptured, but is in its own unique way a moment of perfection that the narrator recognizes the radical logic of dropping out of the race for human achievement.
While America settled into its mold of patriotic vulgarity, I began to despair, for everything reminded me of Bosnia in 1991. The War on Terror took me to the verge of writing poetry again, but I knew better.
This quote provides insight into how the novel deals with twin thematic threads linking political history with the literary future of the writer. The narrator’s parents were Yugoslav immigrants and by September 11, 2001 Yugoslavia no longer existed. The bloodline relationship to those fighting in the Bosnia War informs the narrator on a personal level about the dreaded effects of patriotism taken to the extreme; people and nations disappear.
In the trees outside, a nation of birds replaced the blood-sucking bats and was now atwitter in a paroxysm of meaningless life.
Important to remember when reading the book is that the first-person narrator of the stories is a writer. Therefore, he would write as a writer. This likely accounts for the plethora sentences constructed like this one. Verbose, overwrought with imagery, pumping metaphorical muscle, these sentences exist to prove that a writer composed them. Had the novel been written in the third person such sentences would not just stand out, they would be absurd. Perspective changes context.
