TOLLER TOLLING FOR A HAPPY END

Bekim Sejranović: A More Beautiful Ending (Profil, Zagreb, 2010)

By: Ivan Telebar

Leaving pencil marks on paper is not essentially any different than typing on the keyboard. Snow that is piling on a window sill of a rented apartment in Oslo is as white as the snow that covers the front porch of a cabin in the Bosnian hinterland. More than a thousand kilometres by air separate Norway and Bosnia and Herzegovina, but Bekim Sejranović’s prose obscures this geographical fact with the lives of his characters. That is the foundation for his latest novel, A More Beautiful Ending.

The title of the novel implies a comparison and a semantic dilemma. The reader could be confused as to what the title is about. A more beautiful ending – more beautiful than what? Is there some kind of an enchanted place, a town or happy end? The answer to the latter is in the title, while the former is evoking Sejranović’s first novel Nowhere, Out of Nowhere (Profil, Zagreb, 2008). A More Beautiful Ending is structurally similar to its predecessor, but differs from it thematically. With the title of the novel, the author actually promises his readers a happy end.

Subject split

The story begins in Bosnia, in an isolated cabin between two villages where the narrator recalls his past. There are two parallel plots. The first one talks about his everyday life in the Bosnian shack, and the second one goes back two years and follows his life in Oslo and finally merges with the beginning of the first plot. This narrative braid is a much more solid structure than the one from the previous novel. The boundaries between the two narrative lines are clear, despite the shifts that correspond to moments of emotional instability of the narrator, which makes the storytelling credible.

Psychological turmoil in which we find the narrator, who is also the main character, is very accentuated and propels the events. By using enviable amounts of narcotics, he tries to muffle out the voice he is hearing, while his spontaneous coming and goings only cause more problems. Narrator’s psychological self-portraits are the most macabre parts of the novel, but they are also extremely cynical and auto ironic, which prevents the reader from activating their own latent neuroses. Sejranović created a character that is being digested by his own past, but who is aware of all of his obsessions. An important moment in his profiling is simultaneous belonging and non-belonging to different places which additionally splits the already flaky identity of the character. In Norway, he is a foreigner on the outside, because he differs from the Scandinavian phenotype, while in Bosnia, he is a foreigner on the inside, the one who indifferently watches the changes in Bosnian society. The internal struggle does not allow him to settle down, but where ever he goes, he wishes he was somewhere where he is not. His escape to another country is actually an escape from himself. Anxiety in Bosnia and Norway may have a different front, but the back is all the same.

Vicious circle of self-pity and drug abuse is briefly interrupted by a romantic episode. After an incident at the Oslo airport, narrator’s thoughts focus on Cathrine, an older woman with whom he starts an affair. Love never really happens. As the infatuation fades away, old habits come back, along with several new fixations. The objects of his desire change to a young psychiatrist, legally his drug dealer, and Irena, Cathrin’s nineteen-year old daughter. There is an obvious gap between expectations and disappointments in his romantic adventures. On the one hand, he wants safety, to hide from the rest of the world between woman’s breasts, on the other hand, he does not want (or cannot) reciprocate by offering that same safety. He is emotionally stunted, he was deeply hurt when his wife left him and that seems to lie at the heart of all his problems, both psychological and romantic ones.

Beardless Islam

Passivity and letting fate run its course will not go away when he returns to Bosnia where his alienation will take on a physical dimension. In the isolation of his cabin, he is unsuccessfully struggling against his own indifference and dejectedness. Salih, his one-eyed cousin and the mastermind behind the master plan to rescue his sister Alma from a life that is largely influenced by the Vehabis, disturbs his pessimistic seclusion. That is why he convinces his cousin to take her away to Norway and marry her. Through this narrative line, Sejranović portrays a Bosnian village M., its relation to religion, but also its impressionability. When the Vehabis step in, everything begins to change. The villagers who did not care a great deal about religion before, are now leaning towards fundamentalist teachings, which is a change that also affect Salih’s family. His father and brothers have turned into Vehabis and started growing beards. Also, they have already found an acceptable husband for Alma. Salih is portrayed as a simple, yet reasonable and determined man, who sees, from the very beginning, how fake the spiritual revival in the village actually is. Salih finds the conversions irksome and does not want Alma to be a victim of Vehabism. He sees salvation somewhere else; to him, Germany is a promised land.

There is a historic layer in the novel because the narrator also plays the role of the chronicler. The author introduces the issue of ethos, and more importantly, talks about ethnic cleansing at a micro location. Serjanović manages to subdue the seriousness of the topic with a story of Karavlasi tradition and their way of life, but in spite of that, the representation of genocide remains one of the most powerful moments in the novel. After the war of the 1990’s, the village that was burnt to the ground and abandoned, was populated by refugees, and after that, the Vehabis.

The tone in the epilogue is completely different. The last chapter of the novel is filled with optimism and witty remarks. Finally, the happy end that we have been waiting for. The narrator kept to Salih’s plan and is now living with Alma and another friend in a rented apartment in Oslo, where he starts to write his novel. In many ways, this novel resembles the VW car the main characters drives. It has a slow start, looks like it is about to fall apart, collapse onto itself and die about half-way in, but then torque kicks in, it is moving and we are seduced by its charm. A dark beginning is needed in order to have a more beautiful ending.