Celebration

Mijo, a soldier in the Nazi-allied Ustaša force, has returned to his village at the end of the war. He’s hiding in a hole in the woods, watching as the soldiers who want him dead return again and again to his house, disturbing his wife and children at all times of the day. If he can just wait them out, the atrocities of the war and his involvement in it will be forgotten, and then he can have what he really wants: a quiet life farming his land with his family. Or so he naively believes.

How did Mijo become the monster we encounter in these pages? Damir Karakaš, a war reporter who witnessed the horrors of the breakup of Yugoslavia firsthand, examines the recent history of an unsettled region in evocative prose, contrasting the beauty of nature against the failings of people.