Angela Brkic's The Stone Fields is subtitled 'An Epitaph for the Living', but its underlying and overwhelming theme is death - death in Bosnia. It is a chronicle of Brkic's Bosnian Croat family, from the end of the First World War to the present day (Brkic's father emigrated to the US in 1959 and she was born there). The emphasis is on war: the Second World War, but especially the wars between Serbs and Croats in Croatia and in Bosnia, after Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991. The jumping about is confusing: other people's family structures, almost always hard to take in, are especially difficult when the names are exotic and unfamiliar. Thoughtfully, Brkic has provided a family tree, as well as a map and a key to pronunciation. Even so, it might have been better to begin with her grandparents and work up to her own arrival in the Balkans at the age of 22.

LRB 3 March 2005 | PDF Download