Pretty Birds: A Novel
by Scott Simon
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Book Summary Information
Author: Scott SimonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2006-05-09
ISBN: 0812973305
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Pretty Birds: A Novel
Book Review: A difficult story to read, but well worth it
Summary: 5 Stars
After reading "Pretty Birds" I can say it must have been author Scott Simon's intent to empathize with the people of Sarajevo who suffered profoundly under the siege. His characters - primarily a Bosnian Muslim middle-class family - are not strangers in rags running in a desolate land. Rather, the Zarics resemble the family two doors down: Irena, the Air Jordan-wearing high school basketball star who signs to Madonna and reads Vogue; her parents - Dalila and Milo - who were idealistic college kids swept up in the myriad movements of the 1960s.
As their world deteriorates into chaos, each reacts in their own way. Milo remains inventive in conserving candlewax and rainwater. Dalila combats the ennui of mere survival by looking after her older neighbors in their bombed-out apartment building. Irena becomes a sniper, and much of her internal dialogue is a debate between justifying the retaliatory murders of the Serbian besiegers and appealing to a higher morality that compels her to aim just above their heads.
This book is well-written and would be a quicker read if one did not have to stop every so often as a character after character is brutally silenced by a mortar or a sniper's clever shot. Simon spares no agony here in his brutal illustration of the horrors of war upon a very familiar civilian populace. Nor does he ever let the victims be seen as statistics, going to lengths to describe their personalities as a seasoned journalist knows how to do. I came away from "Pretty Birds" with a tragically personal sense of the thousands of losses the students, managers, clerks, clerics, businessman and housewives endured under the crush of civil war.
Summary of Pretty Birds: A Novel
The universally respected NPR journalist and bestselling memoirist Scott Simon makes a dazzling fiction debut. In Pretty Birds, Simon creates an intense, startling, and tragicomic portrait of a classic character-a young woman in the besieged city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s.In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star on her Sarajevo high school basketball team, a tough, funny teenager who has taught her parrot, Pretty Bird, to do a decent imitation of a ball hitting a hoop. Irena wears her hair short like k. d. lang's, and she loves Madonna, Michael Jordan, and Johnny Depp. But while Irena rocks out and shoots baskets with her friends, her beloved city has become a battleground. When the violence and terror of "ethnic cleansing" against Muslims begins, Irena and her family, brutalized by Serb soldiers, flee for safety across the river that divides the city.
If once Irena knew of war only from movies and history books, now she knows its reality. She steals from the dead to buy food. She scuttles under windows in her own home to dodge bullets. She risks her life to communicate with an old Serb school friend and teammate. Even Pretty Bird has started to mimic the sizzle of mortar fire.
In a city starved for work, a former assistant principal offers Irena a vague job, "duties as assigned," which she accepts. She begins by sweeping floors, but soon, under the tutelage of a cast of rogues and heroes, she learns to be a sniper, biding her time, never returning to the same perch, and searching her targets for the "mist" that marks a successful shot. Ultimately, Irena's new vocation will lead to complex and cataclysmic consequences for herself and those she loves.
As a journalist, Scott Simon covered the siege of Sarajevo. Here, in a novel as suspenseful as a John le Carr? thriller, he re-creates the atmosphere of that place and time and the pain and dark humor of its people. Pretty Birds is a bold departure, and the auspicious beginning of yet another brilliant career for its author.
From the Hardcover edition.
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