The Bosnian author and poet Faruk Šehić is best known for his first novel, Quiet Flows the Una, which won the 2013 EU prize for literature. Originally published in 2004 but only now available in English, Under Pressure is a collection of short stories inspired by his time as a combatant in the Bosnian war of the 1990s. They tell of towns devastated by aerial bombing, of streets and rivers littered with corpses. A dead soldier has had his eyes pecked out by birds: “His eyelashes looked monstrous, trimming two empty eye sockets like sunflower petals bordering the pistil.” One war-weary narrator pours scorn on nationalist songs that urge people to “be part of a stained glass window where the dominant colour is that of human mince”.
Šehić’s protagonists purge themselves of trauma by bingeing on whatever they can lay their hands on – beer, weed, diazepam and the Bosnian fruit brandy, rakia – and regaling one another with cringe-inducing sexual banter. Scatological allusions abound. One story features a “dog licking the haemorrhoid blood off the turd I shat out behind the shed this morning”. Šehić pummels the reader with crassness and filth in order to convey the brute ugliness of war.
Under Pressure was Šehić’s prose debut – he was 33 when it was first published – and it bears the telltale signs of early work. The prose is lively and fearless, but the narrative voice, with its distinct nod to the louche swagger of Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller, feels decidedly secondhand. The translator, Mirza Purić, has sought to render Šehić’s dialogue in an approximation of English working-class diction, for added realism. The execution is a little overcooked: a conspicuous superabundance of colloquialisms such as “well dodgy”, “yonks ago” and “bint”, combined with a preponderance of studiously dropped consonants and aitches (“’E’s not even a ’uman bein’ any more”), lends the speech a parodic quality redolent of the early days of Jamie Oliver. Rendering the vernacular with subtlety and conviction is the holy grail of literary translation; Purić doesn’t quite pull it off, but he is in good company.
• Under Pressure by Faruk Šehić, translated by Mirza Purić, is published by Istros (RRP £9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
