The Yugoslav wars, which ranged from 1991 to 2000, besides causing immense human suffering and loss, also precipitated wide scale discussion about how human suffering and cultural destruction can and should be represented. Moreover, as a conflict that was globally represented by the media—the Sarajevo siege from 1992 to 1995 has been dubbed a media spectacle—it presented authors and poets with the inescapable question of not just how to write, but also how to write in a reality saturated with media images. Therefore any new publication that seeks to tackle these issues is more than welcome, especially if it dares to offer close readings of Dubravka Ugrešić, David Albahari, and Semezdin Mehmedinović at the heart of its critical endeavor, as does Dragana Obradović’s book Writing the Yugoslav Wars. The book fulfills its promise of meticulous analysis of literary discourse, and deserves praise for this.

That being said, I would argue that its discussion of the key concerns—ethics, postmodernism, and literary representation—would have better fared in a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, involving other literary cultures and media.

In the case of Dubravka Ugrešić the author focuses on the essayistic. Even though there is a profound understanding of “the pitfalls of the essay genre” (72), the choice for this genre per se rather limits the view of Ugrešić’s important inventions in the blurring of genres, especially in her novel/essay/collage Muzej bezuvjetne predaje (The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, 1998). The discussion of Ugrešić’s work also shows certain limitations of this study's understanding of postmodernism. When the author—rightly—points to Danilo Kiš as key author in defining the significance and work of the aesthetic form in former Yugoslavia, she characterizes him as a modernist writer. It has been my view that Kiš shared a mode of writing with fellow central European authors such as Péter Esterházy from Hungary, which responded to and emulated the innovations of the French nouveau roman. This mode of writing qualifies as a specific, local, central European branch of postmodernism that only becomes discernible when one takes a comparative perspective. The arrival of postmodern culture and theory in the 1980s in the then-Yugoslavia is also relevant, but more so is this earlier tradition—especially to a writer such as Ugrešić, whose work abounds with intertextual references to Kiš.

All of the writers discussed here beg to be discussed in a comparative context, not just for their literary affinities, but also because they are all writing for, or against, or with at least two implied audiences, perhaps even realities: home (whatever that may be after the dissolution of the Yugoslav commonwealth), and the exile environment. Take, for instance, the different versions of Ugrešić’s novel Ministarstvo boli (The Ministry of Pain, 2005): the original version contains large quotations from Miroslav Krleža's key modernistic novel Povratak Filipa Latinovicz (The Return of Filip Latinovicz, 1932); the Dutch (Ugrešić resides in Amsterdam), and perhaps also other translations have omitted these. Is this rewriting also a token of postmodernity—of the open-endedness of literary form?

Moreover, there is more relevant rewriting going on. The discussion of Semezdin Mehmedinović’s Sarajevo Blues (1995) fails to mention that there consist three versions of the text. It seems that this lucid, brilliant, and moving text was rewritten and re-ordered each time the author changed places—and finally went into exile. What was at stake each time was a quest for definitive form. For instance, if one agrees to discern religious motives in Sarajevo Blues, then these almost disappear in the later, English translation (the editing of which was condoned by the author).

Furthermore, the central ethical issue of Writing the Yugoslav Wars—how postmodernist literature can represent human suffering—would have yielded different insights in a comparative context. Now, Susan Sontag's visits to Sarajevo under siege are described as “Eurocentric” (144) and “celebrity activism,” but doesn't Judith Butler's notion of the precariousness of human life—rightly mentioned in this book—call for a more nuanced, gradual distinction as to who was insider and who was outsider? In fact, Mehmedinović calls for this in a more recent exchange of letters with fellow writer Miljenko Jergović (Transatlantic Mail, 2009).

Arguably, if one wishes to discuss—as the author proposes in a brief conclusion—the relative anonymity of these authors (perhaps with the exception of Ugrešić) on the global market of culture (“geolitical deathworlds” [161], the phrase from Debjani Ganguly), then other names from other media come to mind. Director Danis Tanović received an Academy Award for his film Ničija Zemlja (No Man's Land, 2002), and there is the towering success of conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović, for instance for her performance Balkan Baroque (1997).