Where you come from

by Sasa Stanisic           

His new novel “Where You Come From” is a powerful exploration of identity and belonging. It is about a village where only thirteen people remain, a country that no longer exists, his own shattered family, whose world is uprooted and remade by war: their history, their life before the conflict, lost in made-up memories, coincidences, choices, and in a dragons’ den. Mixing auto-fiction, fable, and some magic realism, Stanišic traces a family's escape during the conflict in Yugoslavia, and the years that followed as they built a new life in Germany. As he explores what it means to be European today, he describes how it feels to learn a new language, to find new friends and new jobs, and to build a new identity between countries and cultures.

In August, 1992, a boy and his mother flee the war in Yugoslavia They arrive in Germany and six months later, the boy’s father joins them, bringing a brown suitcase, insomnia, and a scar on his thigh. Saša Stanišic’s is a novel about homelands, both remembered and imagined, lost and found. A book that cleverly plays with form and genre, to explore questions that lie inside all of us: about language and shame, about arrival and making it just in time, about what role our origins and memories play in our lives.

This inventive and surprising novel asks: what makes us who we are?

What we all found very moving was the author´s relationship and interaction with his left behind grandmother, who suffers from dementia.

Blanka