Summary
Said Khatibi: Sarajevo Firewood
"Said Khatibi's daring and remarkable novel, Sarajevo Firewood, is a journey through a labyrinth, with Algeria at one end, Bosnia at the other and Slovenia serving as a neutral intermediate space. When the two narrators, Selim from Algeria and Ivan from Sarajevo, are exposed to shocking revelations about their family origins, we embark on a journey within a journey. On that journey, we are forced to reconsider everything we think we know about liberation, nationalism, decolonization and war, while Hatibi masterfully shifts our focus from the state to the family and the constant trauma of understanding oneself in the process of creating an individual."
Amijel Alkalaj
"With his artistic and human vision of the horrors in which Algeria and Bosnia and Herzegovina, two different parts of the world, met the threshold of the 21st century, Said Hatibi from wood he creates the trope of survival from the title of his novel, which symbolizes not only the struggle for the bare life of Sarajevo during the siege of the city, which lasted for almost four years, but also all the unimaginable horrors and consequences of wars on all meridians. With this ogrev, the author connects the heroes of the novel, Selim and Ivan, in pain, but also in literature, which, although it is a product of the creative imagination, contains the greatest truths. to reexamine and repent, to write in the name of memory, in the name of life."
Dragan Đorđević
"Said Hatibi's polyphonic novel, Sarajevo wood for firewood, pays respect to the victims of the civil war in Algeria and Bosnia in the 1990s, and gives a voice to the survivors. In the scars of unstable memories and traumatic memories, which are characteristic of psychological war wounds, writing is a way to come to terms with by what happened.”
George de Chamberet, BookBlast
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