Around the World in 80 Books discussion
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Diane , Armchair Tour Guide
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Sep 01, 2011 03:15PM
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Uhm shouldn't this book be posted in Bosnia and Herzegovina thread? I mean, I haven't read the book, but the blurb states it is set in Sarajevo :/ although it might be partly set in Croatia too!
Uhm shouldn't this book be posted in Bosnia and Herzegovina thread? I mean, I haven't read the book, but the blurb states it is set in Sarajevo :/ although it mig..."
I can only encourage you to read the book to see how much of the book is set in Croatia. I estimate it to be about seventy percent with nearly all ares of the country covered. It will be worth your effort. Bok!
Recently published as a Kindle and now picked up by a publisher for release as a print version - but the Kindle is here now, is inexpensive and has links to a huge range of music and video from Croatia and ex-Yugoslavia.
Hvala! B
****
How did a song recorded in 1981 by a young multi-racial punk rock band from a ‘stagnating provincial English city’ and released on a tiny independent record label become famous in a Yugoslavia formed in the image of Marshall Tito? Why did it take 30 years before the members of the band found out? How was it that this ‘communist’ country had one of the most vibrant punk-rock scenes in the world? Who were ’Tito’s punks’ and who are they now?
More than three decades later, the author sets out from his home in the Netherlands to follow the journey of the song, through a time and a country that no longer exists. On the way he encounters borders and Brutalism, discovers the world’s first fascist micro-state, sees the legacy of the NATO bombings, the impact of ‘turbo-capitalism’ and the ever-present ghosts of genocides and the Holocaust. But unexpectedly also, the Yugoslavs’ love of British TV sitcoms and Northern Ireland punk, tales of Nirvana and REM, Van Gogh and Vermeer, pirates and Black Wave movies, the Yugoslav story behind the Sound of Music, the embracing warmth of Balkan hospitality and a dizzying stream of rakija.
What emerges is a lesser told, unvarnished but also affectionate portrait of Yugoslavia in the years before its demise through to the present, seen through the unlikely lens of punk and punk rockers. Part travelogue, part history the book is both, and neither, of those things. Rather, it is a mural of that journey.
“We went to sleep in Disneyland, and we woke up in the apocalypse.”
“The socialism was not the problem, the parents were the problem.”
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5...
The more you read, the more you learn that's makes you perfect. peryourhealth
Going to the sea side with her grandmother to visit another grandmother does not sound like the best summer vacation of all time to a 12 year old girl, Sophia – the protagonist of this novel.
Everything happens on an island in the Adriatic Sea – Hvar, where Sophia does not know anyone, and where you do not understand the local dialect or local customs, nor why your grandmother cries when she sees her sister. Although her summer seems to start like a complete disaster and the protagonist at first hides behind books and music and daydreaming hoping the time will pass quicker.
Gradually Sophia discovers that even such a small place can be full of stories and human destinies one can find in novels, that sometimes you can learn more from conversations with your grandmother and cousins that you barely know, than with your best friend. It can also happen that after you spend some time there you wish to come back to that place again.
P. S. Although it is originally in the Serbian language (the main character is a Serb), the entire plot of the novel is set in Croatia.
Around the World in 80 Books
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