リュブリアナから4台の大きな観光バスに分乗してやって来た。いったい我々の一行様は全部で何人くらいいるのだろう？何をやってるかは、ここに載っている。道中の景色をほとんど見ることがなかった。ちらちらっと見る景色はちょっとアフガニスタンに似ているなと思ったが、それ以上追求することもなく、シベニクという街の近くのSolaris Holiday Resort Complex という、たわけた場所に到着した。ビーチ沿いに何軒かのホテルが点在している。その全体をまとめてリゾート・コンプレックスと呼んでいるようだ。
バスの中でリュブリアナ最後の晩に買った『Ｓ．― A Novel about the Balkans』という本にどっぷりとはまった。景色なんかどうでも良くなった。一番後部の座席を全部一人占めして、寝転んでずっとそれを読んでいた。小説だから真実を書けるという見事な例だと思う。
クロアチアは、スロベニアに比べるとまた一段と素朴な雰囲気がある。物価もはるかに安い。ビーチで見る海水はとても澄んでいた。
今日は一人でタクシーに乗ってシベニクまで出かけてみた。海岸ぎりぎりの丘陵に石造りの家がぎっちりと張り付いている風景はとても興味深い。15世紀に建てられたというCathedral を見た。これも石以外何も使っていない。UNESCOの世界遺産に登録されているそうだ。
アドリア海がすぐ目の前に見える。シベニクの前の海でアドリア海から来る海水と川の真水が混ざり、いちばんいい魚がここでたくさん獲れると、タクシーの運転手は自慢気に話していた。イタリア側ではいい魚が獲れない、ヒッヒッヒ、みたいなことを言っていた。これ（↓）がシベニクの街。
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
"While she was in the warehouse S. feared uncertainty. Any kind of certainty seemed preferable to her. Now she was at least rid of that fear. There was no more uncertainty. She was in a storehouse of women, in a room where female bodies were stored for the use of men."
The use of rape as a mode of warfare was one of the atrocities that made "ethnic cleansing" such a horrifying euphemism in the '90s. The number of Muslim rape victims has been hard to establish (estimates are as high as 60,000), and the depths of the damage even more difficult to comprehend. Hidden behind the newspaper accounts--the mind-numbing policy changes, drawn and redrawn borders, and fluctuating statistics--are the stories of what happened to thousands of Muslim women and how they have since dealt with their experience. In S: A Novel About the Balkans, the journalist Slavenka Drakulic uses a fictional everywoman, S., to convey the complex psychological torture of the victims of large-scale, systematic rape during the Bosnian War.
Drakulic's plain, graphic prose is starkly effective; not surprisingly, her book is most powerful in the passages detailing the women's treatment by the cadres of Serbian soldiers. But S. is not just a passive victim: even in such conditions, there are moral choices that must be made and consequences to one's actions. S. discovers this through her "arrangement" with the camp commander, who chooses her for a more elaborate form of rape that involves candlelight dinners and her playing the role of a seductress. Submitting to the fantasy in order to remove herself from the gang rapes of the "women's room," S. refrains from using her new status to improve the lot of the other prisoners. The tradeoff risks the respect of her fellow victims ("You've sold yourself cheap," one of them says to her), and the future psychological cost isn't clear. When she discovers she is pregnant--the father could be any one of a hundred soldiers--she faces another set of difficult decisions. Should she bring a child born of such hate into the world? And should she tell the child about its origins? Or is she instead obliged to tell the truth about the war? "Which is the greater," she wonders, "the right to a father or the right to the truth." Though not overtly political, S. forces us to consider the long-term tragedy of the female victims of the Bosnian War, and is all the more valuable for its inclusion of these gray-area compromises and their painful aftereffects. --John Ponyicsanyi --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
S. lies in the Karolinska Hospital in Sweden, where she has just given birth to a baby boy. She refuses to nurse him. Maj, in the next bed, is worried and shocked, but she is not aware of the trauma in which the baby was conceived. It is March of 1993, and S. spent the previous summer in a Bosnian prison camp. She cannot guess which of the men who raped her there was the baby's father. As she lies in the hospital bed, S. remembers the summer of 1992, from the day when the soldiers rounded up the occupants of the Muslim village of B., shot the men and herded the shocked, obedient women onto buses. She remembers life in the camp, where she was assigned to help E., the nurse, tend the sick, and the horrible rumors about the "women's room," where women are taken for the Serbian soldiers to rape. Soon it is her turn for the "women's room"; surviving rape and dehumanization, she develops a protective need to forget. But she cannot forget the other women in the room, their struggles, their wounds, their deaths. All she has succeeded in obliterating is her previous life, in which she was a teacher, with parents and a sister who once lived in Sarajevo. They have vanished, and she would have disappeared, too, if she had stayed with them. She has vanished, anyway, into the depersonalized world of the raped, the refugee, the woman without a country. This novel by journalist and novelist Drakulic (The Balkan Express; The Taste of a Man) is a terrifying, graphic story of a country's lost identity, told through the suffering of the nameless inmates of the camp and their attempts to rebuild their lives after liberation. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
The anger that echoes through this review is the natural reaction of a feminist sensitive to the subject of rape. But how else can any woman react to the barbaric treatment of women during the Balkan civil war? Drakulic once again explores the bigotry of the Balkan mentality (as in Caf? Europa, for instance), here coming unbearably close to the actual truth of the rapes of Bosnian women between 1992 and 1995. The simple story unfolds from the protagonist's perspective: before she can rebuild her life after surviving unthinkable physical abuse in a Serbian concentration camp, S. first has to face its consequence and give birth to an unwanted child. Drakulic delineates the most intimate moments with controlled precision and stops your pulse with sentences like this: "She was in a storehouse of women...where female bodies were stored for the use of men." A fully authentic novel, S. is also an important historical document at times reminiscent of Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz (1949). Readers may try to comfort themselves that this kind of savagery happens only far away from home, but that is not true--which is precisely the bitter point. Every paragraph makes you fearfully aware of the unpredictable nature of even the most civilized human conduct. Highly recommended.
---Mirela Roncevic, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The New York Times Book Review, Rand Richards Cooper
Drakulic has set out to convey the experience of captivity in conditions of physical and psychological torment so extreme that, as we commonly say, they defy description. The prose she brings to this task is plain and unmetaphoric, and at times the novel achieves a terse factuality, letting the terror speak for itself. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Booklist
When Serbian forces overrun her village, a young Muslim schoolteacher, S., is taken prisoner and transported to a death camp for Bosnians. At first unable to believe what is happening, S. slowly adapts to life in the camp, trying to ignore the horrors around her. When, however, she is chosen to live in the "Women's Room," in which the more attractive prisoners are kept for the pleasure of Serbian soldiers, her sanity begins to slip, and she finds that she is increasingly uncertain of her identity. Tortured and repeatedly raped, the young woman is eventually released and sent to a refugee camp, pregnant with a child who constantly reminds her of her time as a prisoner. This deeply moving story of courage and renewal shockingly demonstrates the power of war to dehumanize aggressor and victim alike. Drakulic explores the psychology of captivity, documenting the soul's struggle to remember itself despite the body's degradation. Bonnie Johnston --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
Justly acclaimed as a journalist and an essayist, Drakuli chose the novel for her latest tale of the terrors of the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. While the authors reputation in the US is largely based on her reporting (Cafe Europa, 1997, etc.), work typically marked by a certain dry, black humor, her fourth novel (after Holograms of Fear, 1992, etc.) is somber, relentlessly bleak, until its disappointingly predictable life-affirming close, which is regrettably rather flat. S., the title character, is a young schoolteacher living and working in a small Bosnian village when the Serbs overrun it in late May 1992. She and all of the towns women are taken prisoner and removed to a concentration camp, where shes raped repeatedly by Serb soldiers. When the survivors of this nightmarish experience are exchanged for Serb prisoners, S. finds herself pregnant, goes to Sweden, and gives birth to a boy whose father could be any of the many men who brutalized her. The story opens in the hours after the infants delivery, as S. fights against her nurturing instincts toward the child, whom she plans to put up for adoption. This grim account will be familiar to anyone whos been reading the newspapers in the past decade or whos dipped into the copious literature of the Holocaust. Sadly, Drakuli is unable to give voice to S.s plight in a fashion that doesnt continually remind you of other, better works of this sort. S.s narrative, in first- as well as third-person, never rises above the clichs of the genre, and Drakuli is ill-served by a translation that is both banal and clumsy. Its always depressing when a serious book by a gifted author on an important topic is a failure. This one is more painful than most. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The Nation
...Slavenka Drakulic has given the world a gift, digging into the twisted reality of war...a novel of cataclysmic power.
Iris Chang, bestselling author of The Rape of Nanking
"I shuddered as I read each page of this terrifying, brilliant novel. Slavenka Drakulic forced me to inhabit the soul of S., a Bosnian woman made pregnant by months of gang rape in a Serbian prison camp. Every chapter resonates with truth, horror and remarkably, even -- hope." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Los Angeles Times, February 6, 2000
Slavenka Drakulic is the very voice of pain. She is dripping with pain. Her novel "Marble Skin" housed the pain of a girl's sexual competition with her mother. "The Taste of Man" contained all the pain a woman could feel from a man. All her books contain the political pain of being born in Croatia in 1949 and living for the last 50 years in the Balkans. "S." is about the pain of rape in concentration camps created by the Serbs in the early 1990s. It is told in the voice of a woman who in 1992 is taken from her village and placed in a camp. Shortly thereafter, she is chosen with eight others to live in "the woman's room," from which Serb soldiers choose each night whom they will rape. The novel is about what she sees: the 13-year-old girls who are raped, the fathers who are forced to rape their sons, the mothers who kill their newborn infants born from rape. Reading these things is nothing like living through them but conveys some of the same gut reactions: shame for being human, for being safe and warm, for knowing about these things and doing nothing. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
Set in 1992, during the height of the Bosnian war, S. reveals one of the most horrifying aspects of any war: the rape and torture of civilian women by occupying forces. S. is the story of a Bosnian woman in exile who has just given birth to an unwanted child-one without a country, a name, a father, or a language. Its birth only reminds her of an even more grueling experience: being repeatedly raped by Serbian soldiers in the women's room of a prison camp. Through a series of flashbacks, S. relives the unspeakable crimes she has endured, and in telling her story-timely, strangely compelling, and ultimately about survival-depicts the darkest side of human nature during wartime.
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Serbo-Croation --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
About the Author
Slavenka Drakulic is a world renowned journalist and novelist. She contributes to The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and other international newspapers and magazines. She divides her time among Sweden, Austria, and Croatia. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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