Reports from a Dark World

This reportage from a dark world repeatedly links together seemingly unrelated events in prose that skillfully interweave authenticity and fiction, exposing and illuminating the »spiraling form of time«.

It is only twenty minutes by foot from the spot on the Lateinerbridge where the two successors to the Hansberger throne were assassinated at the beginning of the twentieth century, to the Vrbanjabridge, where two students were murdered at the end of 1992. With a sober impartiality, Dzevad Karahasan dispels the darkness that shrouds both the terrain and people who have crossed it.
Karahasan follows the traces left by the twentieth century in Bosnia and his hometown of Sarajevo. »Anatomy of Sadness« is about the son of an Italian partisan and a Yugoslavian communist who relates his life in exile. In »Gabriel's Principle«, inquiries lead the narrator to Theresienstadt, where he discovers that Gavrilo Princip, the assassin from Sarajevo, was imprisoned. »Letters from the year 1993«, tells of a student confronting his instructors with letters from a man who lost his life in Sarajevo.