This searing, emotionally resonant story collection immerses us in the struggles of characters who, in many cases, are trying to make sense of the past, or of murky or troubled relationships–often, when they are at a crossroads in their lives. Haunting virtually all of the stories are traumas from the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
Linforth considers how chasms may exist between family members, or between (current or former) lovers–and how it may be possible to never fully connect with, much less understand, those with whom we share blood, or with whom we’ve shared our lives. Yet sometimes, those chasms can be bridged, and he captures such moments with powerful prose.
In the collection’s title story, “The Distortions,” there seems to be little more than a blood connection, at first, between the main character, Adin, and his great uncle, a Bosnian who took up residence in Zagreb, Croatia, after the Bosnian War, which he’d covered as a journalist. Adin is Bosnian, too, but at the start of the war, when he was barely three, he fled with his family to New York. Since that time, his uncle had just been someone mentioned in his grandmother’s stories. Adin observes: “To me, my uncle was just another relative from the old country, a man I would never meet.”
That all changes when a grown Adin, at his grandmother’s behest, flies to Zagreb with the orders of preparing his uncle for a move to the United States. Her goal is to reunite him with relatives who, like Adin’s family, had fled Bosnia and the war years earlier.
Adin’s uncle isn’t exactly enthusiastic about moving to the States so late in his life, and at one point he asks, “What am I going to do in your country?” Circumstances seem to conspire to keep him in Zagreb. For one thing, his passport had expired twenty years before, and when he and Adin visit the Bosnia and Herzegovina Embassy with the goal of getting a new one, they learn that he needs a birth certificate to make this happen.
At the embassy, Adin also learns something startling, when his uncle recalls the Bosnian War: “Serbs took my home, killed my friends, my cousins, my son.” Adin never knew about his uncle’s son, and when they head first to the uncle’s hometown (in a futile search of the birth certificate) and then to the spot where the son was buried, they end up taking a kind of journey into the uncle’s past, one that gives Adin a new understanding of him. In the course of this journey, the uncle expresses regret for staying in Bosnia to get the word out about the war, rather than fleeing to America as his relatives had done–a move that might have saved his son’s life.
In the deeply moving final pages of this story, it seems that Adin and his uncle forge a connection that neither one of them could have imagined. These passages offer just one example of how this collection masterfully brings home the lasting personal consequences of a national trauma.
“The Distortions” also explores how Adin is at a crossroads in his life, and facing another relationship chasm, one that might be unbridgeable. As he tries to help his uncle in Bosnia, he regularly calls his girlfriend back in New York, who seems to have become put off by what she perceives as his insufficient ambition as a writer and by his descent into depression. Eventually, she tells him, “Perhaps we shouldn’t even talk.” When things don’t get any better from this point, Adin is left to try to come to terms with his girlfriend’s withdrawal from their relationship, and with what that means for him. In this story and others, Linforth writes with exceptional insight about how romantic relationships can come under stress or fall apart, and about how lovers can be mysteries to each other–sometimes intentionally; other times for reasons that may never become clear.
Another exceptional story in this regard is “Restoration,” in which the main character, Aleksandar, returns to Croatia from his current home, Chicago, in the hopes of reuniting with his ex-girlfriend, Jana. That Jana has invited him to see her seems promising to Aleksandar, yet he can’t seem to get a handle on her motives or true desires, and for much of the story, she insists that the two of them maintain a physical distance. At the same time, Aleksandar is withholding secrets of his own: that he’d left his dying father behind in order to visit Jana, and that he’d once slept with one of her friends.
At Jana’s insistence, she and Aleksandar travel by ferry to an island off Croatia, staying at a shabby guesthouse that reveals a truth about Jana’s life, one that complicates Aleksandar’s hopes of a reunion with her. And when the two of them travel by boat to a famous grotto, things take a troubling turn that, ultimately, offers a kind of insight to Aleksandar, if not a resolution to his feelings regarding Jana.
Like “The Distortions,” “Restoration” also considers the difficulties experienced by characters who are, to a certain extent, caught between two worlds (their birthplace in the former Yugoslavia, and their current home, America). Though they might have escaped some of the horrors of war, they are haunted by regrets over having left family and country behind.
For his part, Aleksandar had moved with his father to the United States after Yugoslavia descended into civil war. (His mother had vanished early in the war, most likely a victim of ethnic cleansing.) Aleksandar feels guilty that he and his father “had failed to find his mother and instead made a life for themselves in Chicago.” Reflecting on his relationship with Jana, Aleksandar observes:
Linforth’s writing about that need for belonging, and for a sense of connection to one’s home country, is one of the most haunting aspects of the collection.
Linforth also writes perceptively about the challenges of making art, and about what can drive, frustrate, or disillusion artists. The story “Flight” explores the creative and personal challenges experienced by a sculptor, Mara, as she tries to push back against deeply entrenched sexism in the art world and to not get stuck in a rut with her work. That rut is represented by a series of sculptures that achieved fame for her in the seventies: plastic-and-fiberglass constructions resembling bird wings.
Since that time, the sculptures have become tiresome to Mara, something she needs to break free of. As she aims for a new direction with her art, Mara “cycles through” relationships with artist’s models–male dancers–whose bodies she first photographs and later videotapes, in search of a new inspiration that will allow fame to “bless her again.” In these relationships, she seems to push back against the male dominance she’d experienced as an emerging artist. She “desires obedience” from the models and tries to control every aspect of her interactions with them. But eventually, Mara finds that she can control only so much about these relationships, the success of her art, and her future in general. Her story offers a powerful exploration of the creative process and its pitfalls, and of artistic and personal ambition and disillusionment.
I wish I could delve into more of the stories in this remarkable and revelatory collection, because all of them are worthy of discussion and reflection. I highly recommend that you discover them for yourself.
Would My Pick be Your Pick?
If you're interested in ________, the answer may be "Yes":￭ Stories about conflicts and challenges in relationships
￭ The conflicts in the former Yugoslavia
￭ The creative process and its challenges
