A Croatian Perspective on the War in Iraq

On Tuesday 23rd April, I attended a book reading and discussion at the Housingworks Bookstore on Crosby St. The book being presented was Robert Perisec’s “Our Man In Iraq.” It is his first book translated into English and the event was his first in the US. It was sponsored by the Croatian consulate.
 
Our Man In Iraq is a collection of emails from a journalist in Iraq. The journalist travels to Iraq and reports what he sees but none of his reports are ever published. For example, the reading we heard was a report about friendly fire, in which the reporter ponders friendly fire, saying that it has existed since around the conception of the notion of humanity or Christianity. What I found really interesting from this event was not the actual reading itself, but the discussion that followed. Many topics were brought up which I will briefly talk about here.

Our Man In Iraq is a different kind of book on the war in Iraq for two reasons. The first is that, unlike the usual war book, this book is quite ironic and satirical. Pretty unusual for a war book if I must say so myself. The other thing is that the book provides a perspective on the Iraqi war from a third point of view (neither Iraqi nor American).

The book is also set across a time period of five years, and through the emails with the time constraint, Perisec was able to go back into the past because his main character, the journalist, was a veteran from the Croatian and Balkan wars. Through the character’s emails, Perisec explore the psychological trauma that lingers and resurfaces throughout life. In addition, Perisec said by also keeping the timeline short, while having Boris recall memories from his wars, allowed the Croatian readers to have this jump from a local dimension to a global one.

Perisec's book explores how Croatian's feel with respect to the war in Iraq. They see it as a stage be be something in the world; Croatia wants to step up to the world stage. This is evident in his book through many occurrences. One such example of this want is when the main character goes missing and a rival newspaper in the story falsely reports that Al Qaeda kidnapped him. As if they would want anything to do with such a small European country. Basically, Perisec's book reflects so much bout how the Croatian people is feeling at the time.

Finally, one interesting thing that came up in the discussion is what we were talking about in class the other day: translation. Perisec would receive countless emails from his translators about what he exactly meant when he used a certain word or phrase, so that it took a while to translate the book to the different languages. One really great example was how the English translator represented a change in the Croatian dialect. To do so, he switched from using regular English to the British cockney accent. I found this quite interesting because I guess there really was no other way to illustrate this change in dialect accurately, but rather to give a sense of what it would be like.

I found this event to be quite insightful as to what goes into writing a book, and how exactly Perisec wanted his book. A lot of topics came up but I found these to be the ones that really stuck with me even a few days after.