How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Saša Stanišic, Anthea Bell

• Publisher: Pushkin Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781782271765
• eBook ISBN: 9781782272304
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. He knows the first chapter of Marx's Das Kapital by heart but spends most of his time playing football in the Bosnian town of Visegrad on the banks of the river Drina.

When his grandfather, a master storyteller, dies of the fastest heart attack in the world while watching Carl Lewis's record, Aleksandar promises to carry on the tradition. However when the shadow of war spreads to Visegrad, the world as he knows it stops.

Suddenly it is not important how heavy a spider's life weighs, or why Marko's horse is related to Superman. Suddenly it is important to have the right name and to pretend that the little Muslim girl Asija is his sister. Then Aleksandar's parents decide to flee to Germany and he must leave his new friend behind.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• How long a heart attack takes over a hundred metres, how much a spider’s life weighs, why my sad man writes to the cruel river, and what magic the Comrade-in-Chief of all that’s unfinished can work
• How sweet dark red is, how many oxen you need to pull down a wall, why Kraljević Marko’s horse is related to Superman, and how war can come to a party
• Who wins when Walrus blows the whistle, what a band smells of, when you can’t cut fog, and how a story leads to an agreement
• When flowers are just flowers, how Mr Hemingway and Comrade Marx feel about each other, who’s the real Tetris champion, and the indignity suffered by Bogoljub Balvan’s scarf
• When something is an event, when it’s an experience, how many deaths Comrade Tito died, and how the once famous three-point shooter gets behind the wheel of a Centrotrans bus
• What Milenko Pavlović, known as Walrus, brings back from his wonderful trip, how the station-master’s leg loses control of itself, what the French are good for, and why we don’t need quotation marks
• Where bad taste in music gets you, what the three-dot-ellipsis man denounces, and how fast war moves once it really gets going
• What we play in the cellar, what the peas taste like, why silence bares its fangs, who has the right sort of name, what a bridge will bear, why Asija cries, how Asija smiles
• How the soldier repairs the gramophone, what connoisseurs drink, how we’re doing in written Russian, why chub eat spit, and how a town can break into splinters
• Emina carried through her village in my arms
• 26 April 1992
• 9 January 1993
• 17 July 1993
• 8 January 1994
• Hi. Who? Aleksandar! Hey, where are you calling from? Oh, not bad! Well, lousy really, how about you?
• 16 December 1995
• what I really want
• 1 May 1999
• Aleksandar, I really, really want to send you this package
• When Everything Was All Right
• 11 February 2002
• I’m Asija. They took Mama and Papa away with them. My name has a meaning. Your pictures are horrible
• Out of three hundred and thirty Sarajevo numbers rung at random, about every fifteenth has an answering machine
• What makes the Wise Guys wise, how much you ought to bet on your own memory, who is found and whose existence is still unfounded
• What they’re playing behind God’s feet, why Kiko saves the cigarette, where Hollywood is, and how Mickey Mouse learns to answer
• I’ve made lists
• Comrade-in-Chief of all that’s unfinished
• Acknowledgements
• About the Publisher
• About the Author
• Copyright