Selvedin Avdic's SEVEN TERRORS (Tr. by Coral Petrovich)

My experience of the insanely horrific war and genocide that tore through the Balkans in the 1990s was heavily mediated, chiefly by reports on NPR. To this day I still hear the names of those towns and regions in Sylvia Poggioli's distinctive voice.*

Since then I've discovered Joe Sacco, whose autobiographical comics about the conflict are harrowing to see and to read, but beautiful too, and watched all the documentaries on the conflict that YouTube has to offer, but nothing derived from that horrible epoch  has gotten under my skin quite like a short but intense and powerfully erudite little horror novel, Selvedin Avdic's Seven Terrors.

 A book with a title like that must be working off a list, one might think, and indeed a list of seven phobias does appear in its pages -- twice. And it's not the same list. Early on, we get a list that our unnamed narrator composed after hearing from a radio report that a psychologist has recommended the exercise as the first step towards getting over those fears. Later in what is basically an appendix to Seven Terrors, we get another - only this second list, we are given to understand, is cribbed from another character's researches into a bit of local folklore that has obsessed him.

The two lists do not match, though there is a little overlap between them. And the characters in Seven Terrors do not have methodically to encounter and conquer the terrors from either list in the course of the story. Selvedin Avdic is a much more interesting writer than that, and he's got a much more serious point to make: that even though, in the point in time and space that is this novel's setting (a Bosnian village in the late "oughts" or early 2010s), the Bosnian War is well over a decade in the past and thus its horrors can be thought of as having receded to a certain degree, its having happened at all is horror aplenty for its characters to cope with, and its aftermath is still horrifying.

Our narrator, whose wife left him for another man through, as he has accepted ruefully, his own fault, has just come off a nine-month depression jag that has seen him spending the whole time in bed. His Bosnian village, a tiny mining town still half-trashed by the war, doesn't exactly offer state of the art mental health services, and hey, everybody here is coping with grief and trauma and survivor's guilt and personal hurts every bit as bad as our narrator's own.

On the very day he finally seems to be pulling himself together, cleaning up and thinking about going out for a bit, a knock at his door proves to be, not local foreboding lunatic Mikhail, who periodically invades people's spaces to deliver bizarre and cryptic pronouncements that might be reminders of the past, statements on the present or presenitiments of future doom, but a young woman, Mirna, whom our hero last knew as a little girl. Mirna and her mother were sent away early in the fighting, with the promise that Mirna's father Aleksa would soon follow, but Aleksa stayed behind to help other people in worse danger than he and his feared. They kept in touch for a while, and then his letters stopped coming. Aleksa and our narrator were colleagues, journalists at a local radio station. Does our narrator know what became of Aleksa, by any chance?

He does not, so soon is pressed upon by a tearful Mirna to help her find out what happened to her father. She has come into possession of a journal he'd been keeping in the last months before he disappeared, which shows him to have been investigating legends of supernatural presences in the local mining tunnels, and indeed to have encountered a famous one: the Perkmann.** Since his encounter, the miners who at first welcomed him among their ranks have shunned him, maybe because he is a Serb, maybe because belief around the Perkmann holds that the person who has seen him is cursed (although, Aleksa maintains in his journal, this figure is also associated with warnings of disaster, and Aleksa's encounter was in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake that occurred while he was deep in the tunnels. So maybe it really is because Aleksa is a Serb). Still fascinated by the story, Aleksa kept researching and asking around, leading him to meet other sinister figures in the town who aren't nearly so supernatural as the Perkmann, but every bit as terrifying and very, very dangerous. And also some ghostly mining horses, animals who spend their entire useful lives deep underground in the dark and are thus blind by the time they are retired and brought to the surface. To live out the rest of their lives on one of those farms that's too far away to visit and they can't visit you either it's just too far. But nobody's ever short on glue.

But this isn't really a spook story. It's one man's oblique approach to all of the mundane horrors that are too traumatic to confront directly, complicated by everybody else trying to do the same. Shattered psyches everywhere, still with jagged edges to cut each other with on the slightest approach. It's heartbreaking and sad and beautiful.

It's also, often, funny in weird and unpredictable ways. Our narrator having been a radio journalist and our author being an intelligent man who lives in the world, his account is sprinkled with references to American pop culture and some surprisingly passionate opinions about it. A footnote (yes, a novel with footnotes, but hush, this is not some David Foster Wallace infinite jesting, just some cultural clarifications and the odd tangent) veers into considerable vitriol against Vogue magazine in general and Anna Wintour in particular, which seems like a very odd thing for a novel like this to do, but it doesn't feel odd when it happens. And it reminds us that, while we may have the luxury of ignorance about people in other countries living through horrors other than ours, most of them don't have the reciprocal luxury when it comes to us. Our dumbest pop culture tidbits erupt right into their reality and thus their thoughts and discourse, even when examining hurts uniquely their own. A lot more literature is translated from our language into theirs than ever will be from theirs into ours -- and our readers barely read what is written by us, for us, let alone what's been imported from abroad. See also Chad W. Post's The Three Percent Problem.

As for the translation itself, it's resulted in some beautiful English prose that carries some startling and original imagery. One never knows, on this end, what images are carried over wholesale from the original and what are developed by the translator to mimic the effect of something untranslatable, but Coral Petrovich has one way or another given us some stunning English sentences like "At first, a terrible nervousness overcame me, I could have slid out of my skin like soap from a fist." That's one of those that's going to live rent-free in my head for a long time, like Haruki Murakami/Jay Rubin's bit in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle "I glanced at the phone in the living room. It sat on the table, cloaked in silence. It looked like a deep-sea creature pretending to be an inanimate object, crouching there in wait for its prey."

I don't imagine that, in this dreadful eternal year that is still basically 2020, a lot of us are actively looking for stories that remind us that our imagination holds no horrors that are really worse than what we do to each other in real life, but sometimes it is good to see it in a highly original form, and so for that if not for any of the other reasons I've sort of given here, I recommend that you set aside a little time -- and at 149 pages, you won't need much for the actual reading so much as for coming to terms with it after -- and spend it with Seven Terrors.

*I'm Gen X. I was a 20-something in the 90s and too poor for anything but snowy analog broadcast TV and commuted the six miles to work on foot to save time and bus fare. NPR was pretty much my lens on everything.

**Who seems to be a local version of a figure in German folklore called the Bergmonch.