Anywhere anywhere

Títutulu Original: Nowhere, out of nowhere
Translation: Patricia Pizarroso and Marc Casals
Year of publication: 2008
Valoración: Advisable

A funeral according to the Islamic rite, a lot of crowded men and a single man who remains standing, protruding above others and without knowing where to put the arms. The living image of dislocation, of being out of place or not knowing how to “belong” to that site.

That is the image with which it opens Anywhere anywhere, novel in which (re) builds a past in the form of a mosaic, in which personal biography and family album are intertwined and in which the uprooting and will of belonging star “I don’t trust memory and I really can’t stand it”

(Re) Build a mosaic -shaped past. That is the Question! And from there the infinite grids and spaces are derived (from the time of World War II to the 21st century, from the Bosnian people of childhood to the island of Svalbard) always in escape, always fleeing to any corner of the world that we give us a new opportunity.

But also the different styles and tones that we find in the text. Because Sejranović can be a kind of delibes tangled when he speaks of the Brcko of his childhood or a unamuno of the void and the Balkan solitude or a knausgard or a past saeterbakken of thread in that final part of the book in which he destroys the idyllic image of the Scandinavian countries. Because what option is the least bad: get drunk or let memories devour you like termites?

In any case, a good and bitter chronicle of uprooting through time and space (Alija, Lars, Marko, the narrator himself), to which certain doses of black humor come to oxygen, a story of losers, searches and escapes, often grotesque and absurd, of attempts to happiness that are diluted with the course of the pages; A text that grows as we advance in it and moves away from apparent archetypes and/or stereotypes, a text fucked but highly recommended.