STILLNESS

Sixteen stories from a woman who combines her Croatian heritage and her training in forensic archaeology in traveling back to a motherland grated by war.

“In the morgue and on-site, I found letters and prayers in shirt pockets or rolled up with amulets inside tiny leather pouches that the dead had worn around their necks,” Brkic tells us of her own experiences, in 1996, as a researcher and translator in Croatia, and a forensic archeologist in Bosnia after the war. Fiction almost always suffers when the goal is to create a core of tales around a specific event, political or military, but Brkic often maintains a nice distance, even if she sometimes seems to beat her subject to death. A woman in “In the Jasmine Shade” tries to hide a pregnancy from her husband just as they are separated at the onset of the holocaust, creating questions as to whose baby it really is and whether something as frail as trust can survive the trauma. “Surveillance” is an odd love story of a man watching a woman who may be involved with dissidents abroad—but will he ever get closer to her than the lens of his camera? Javier, an Argentine forensic anthropologist fresh from Rwanda, is surprised by Bosnia in “Adiyo, Kerido,” and by the local women anxious for news of the contents of mass graves. “We Will Sleep in One Nest” looks at war from the point of view of paintings that get left behind when families are forced to evacuate on a moment’s notice. And “I heard the drumbeats of all those buried people, of a city living underground,” says the meditative narrator of “Stillness,” who goes on to discover a form of pause and poise amid the crumbled lives that litter the landscapes of slaughter.

Generally strong debut. Here’s hoping Brkic goes on to explore other and different material.