Original title: Me’med, red bandana and snowflake
Translation: Marc Casals Churches
Year of publication: 2017
Valuation: Highly recommended
Like a Hieronymus triptych that had memory and oblivion at its center and was made up of dozens of polaroids, apparently disordered but united by sometimes tenuous or unclear associations.
Or like a mirror book that must be write so as not to exist less, so as not to forgetbecause everything changes from one day to the next (war, illness, death and life). Although Many times the problem is not that we forget, but that we remember.
There are two possible definitions for these diaries of oblivion, three texts that could generally be defined as autobiographical novels and that involve three approaches, from three different points of view, to memory, forgetting, remembering and identity. This last issue is key in the novel since Mehmedinovic is Bosnian and, therefore, European for Asians, Muslim for Europeans, and half-Russian for Americans. To make matters worse, he continues to write in Bosnian, despite having been in the United States since the end of the Balkan War, so always a foreigner, always misplaced. Get in trouble!
November 2, 2010. Semedzin Mehmedinovic suffers a heart attack when he is only 50 years old. This is the starting point of Me’med. They are hours that change the world of the author and the author himself. Fear and insecurity, calls, visits, the first references to identity, to remote and foreign worlds (what is foreign?), to being and to time, star in a text in which the author dissociates himself from the body. who is in the hospital.
5 years later. A diary, a letter to his son Harun, with whom he takes a trip through the Western United States, is the basis of The red bandana. Summary of a wandering, essay on the construction of identity, on otherness, on the father-son relationship, personal history, chronicle of the changes in the United States in the last 20-25 years, … Flashes that lead from the 90s in Bosnia to Monument Valley, photographs, fragments of life… Escapes and searches that in tone, slow and poetic, in plot parallels and in landscapes bring to mind the Paris-Texas of Wim Wenders (without Nastassja Kinski, of course).
April 2, 2016. Sanja, Semedzin’s partner, suffers a stroke and loses short-term memory. The snowflake It is the most “tender” story of the three. What does a relationship become when common memories disappear? How to rebuild a person who has become a stranger to himself? How to remove images from oblivion? How to deal with the paradox of going from the fear of living in a foreign world to the fear of dying in a foreign world? Questions that Mehmedinovic raises and does not try to answer, at least in a forceful way. Rather, they are the deeply human attempts of a old and sentimental soldier, of two children tired and scared to death.
In summary, Diaries of oblivion They are three ways of approaching memory (leaving testimony, contrasting memories, helping to remember) and human relationships in which images have a fundamental importance, a novel with a slow pace, introspective, fragmentary and poetic, not exempt from certain touches. of humor. A very good book that comes, by the way, from the brand new Editorial Deleste, which must be said.
Source: https://unlibroaldia.blogspot.com/2025/01/semezdin-mehmedinovic-diarios-del-olvido.html
