Sarajevo: A War Journal

Reprinted from Oslobodenje , a Sarajevo newspaper, these beautifully crafted essays reflect everyday existence in a city under continual bombardment, from April 1992 to January 1993. Dizdarevic, editor of the newspaper and a writer with a distinctive voice, conveys the hellish scene impressionistically: a burial under sniper fire; a boy compulsively fetching buckets of water to pour on his dead parents in an attempt to revive them. In a typically eloquent passage, he writes: ``I saw a watchmaker's shop that was open for business. What struck me as odd was not that shops are still open, but that there still are people here who are interested in knowing what time it is, and that there are other people who actually know.'' Dizdarevic's fury surfaces when he writes about the United Nations peacekeeping force, whose presence has come to symbolize ``international hypocrisy and political dirty dealing.'' A Muslim who is married to a Serb, Dizdarevic resists taking sides editorially. These gem-like pieces are about human behavior in a city under siege. Photos. (Nov.)