Summary
Miljenko Jergović: Sarajevo Marlboro
The book Sarajevski Marlboro (1994) is Jergović's first prose book, which critics consider the beginning of the so-called trend. realistic prose. It contains 29 short stories in which the war reality of Sarajevo is thematized. Jergović's book, one of the best and most successful prose texts of contemporary Croatian literature, has been translated into all major world languages.
Sarajevo Marlboro was published in 1994, while the siege of Sarajevo was still going on, but its author, a Bosnian Croat, was already living in Zagreb at that time. Jergović, who spent one war year in Sarajevo (1993), describes how war kills everyday, normal life. Everything else ‒ fighting, bombs, death, dismembered bodies on the streets, deaths in search of food and water ‒ all remain in the background of the stories like the backdrop of a war movie.
In the literature on Jergović's book, it has been noted that its title (Sarajevo Marlboro) refers to Bosnian-American relations; in other words, that it alludes to "the American inability to see the events of the Balkan war as anything but a cliché". This allusion was also served by a concrete link with the title of the book: the favorite pre-war cigarettes of Sarajevo were the local version of Marlboro, which Philip Morris experts "designed" for the Bosnian market, adapting it to the local smoking taste (Daniela Strigl).
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