The Shadows of Cities

Karahasan’s poetry of the »storied city« tells about a literature now more at home in the multilingual, asynchronous and multi-dimensional city than ever before in the modern era.

The great Bosnian writer and essayist Dževad Karahasan, rooted in the literary traditions of antiquity and of the Islamic and Christian world, has an understanding of the craft of writing that is out of step with the times. The architecture of his novel, its multifaceted time structure, its linguistic polyphony owes itself to an aesthetic experience of the city. The contrast of public and private spaces, the encounter, even confrontation with the unusual creates tensions that are developed throughout the narrative. Sarajevo stands as a testament to this finding in poetics, a city, which, as Karahasan demonstrates in Ivo Andric’s work, compels refined, perspective-rich writing to reconcile the different cultural traditions and religious practices that exist side-by-side in one place. »One could almost get the idea that Sarajevo is a city that was born to offer the narrative a native land.«