Shards by Ismet Prcic
Black Cat, New York, 2011
From my library hold list.
A young Bosnian, Ismet Prcic, has left his home, his family and his war-torn country to make a new life in Southern California. But it is not what he expects. When he hears a car backfire he dives for cover. He has flashbacks at the strangest times. He falls in love and misses his mother. He remembers the war.
Advised to write “everything” he builds a great pile of pieces, descriptions of his life, letters to his mother, memories of home, bits of the past and the present. And then Mustafa appears. Is he a construct, someone Ismet has created to distance himself from the war? Or is he real?
These are the shards that make up this unusual and disturbing novel. At time a difficult read because of the many bits and pieces, Shards is almost blinding, reflecting life in a war zone, life as an immigrant, and the sometimes mind-bending qualities of memory.
I have this sitting on the shelf! Unread, of course…
Shards is intense and sometimes confusing!
I’m intrigued by this one; it sounds a little like the experience I had with Edem Awumey’s Dirty Feet, which was my first amazing read of this year, but it, too, was also a bit unusual and definitely disturbing. I’ll watch for this one.
I am going to have to find a copy of Dirty Feet. Maybe my library has it..
So the author and the protagnoist have the same name? It is a novel right?
Yup, it is a novel, or maybe it isn’t…
oh I may look this one out gavin ,all the best stu
I think you’d like it, Stu. I found it a bit to mixed up at times but I’m sure that was Prcic’s intent.