“Memories can be home or horror” Interview with the Best-selling author Saša Stanišić

Photo: Katja Saemann

Over the days of 8th to 11th September the city of Reykjavík became crowded with booklovers and world-renowned authors attending the Reykjavík Literary Festival. They engaged in an open conversation on a variety of subjects ranging from politics and war, memory and fiction, environmentalism, sci-fi and humour. The three award-winning bestselling authors Barbara Demick, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Elif Shafak, were one of the major names of the festival which opened with Demick’s speech and reached its peak with Adichie’s keynote and Shafak’s acceptance of the Halldór Laxness Literary Prize. The festival came to its close with the famous Book Ball at Iðnó where literature enthusiasts and party people of the town were invited to dance into the small hours of the night with their favorite authors. 

One of the many remarkable writers, scholars and poets attending the Reykjavík Literary Festival this year, was Saša Stanišić who is the author of the best-selling novels Wie der Soldat das Grammofon repariert (2006; published in English as How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone) and Herkunft (2019; published in English as Where You Come From) for which he received the German Literature Prize. Stanišić’s novels have been exceptionally well received and have been translated into more than thirty languages, including Icelandic.

Stanišić was born in Višegrad in Bosnia-Herzegovina and is the son of a Bosnian mother and a Serbian father. In the spring of 1992, Stanišić had to abandon the home of his childhood as his family fled the Bosnian War and arrived as immigrants to Germany. Stanišić has lived in Germany ever since and writes his novels in German. In his work he has written about the Bosnian War and his family’s experience of the flight and their arrival in Germany. 

We got the opportunity to meet with Saša Stanišić during the festival and to ask him a few questions about the process of becoming an author, the act of writing itself and the blurring boundaries between fact and fiction. Stanišić has a ready smile and when we met him during the festival he was invariably surrounded by his fans and engaged in lively conversation.

What inspired you to become an author? Could you tell us how - or why - you started writing? 

I was – like many authors – an avid reader throughout my childhood and youth. Stories [meant much to me], and at some point at a young age I started telling them and have never stopped since.

Now that you’re a bestselling author, do you feel increased pressure to write? Has it changed how you approach your work or the act of writing in general?

Fortunately, that kid reader in me is still alive and kicking. I am still enthusiastic about creating new words, new worlds, new walks through fictions. Sure, there is some pressure, a banal one, when it comes to finishing a project – as students you have the same friendly enemy: deadlines!

Your novels are in part autobiographical, and in them you have written about your family's and your own memories and experiences from the Bosnian war and of your arrival in Germany. How do you perceive the boundaries between fact and fiction? Is there a particular disadvantage or an advantage to writing about such personal matters?

Writing close to one's biography requires more discipline than roaming through imagination and new creation. Discipline in sense of a loose set of soft “rules” about what might be too intimate to tell, what might be too unfair towards the readers when altering facts to maybe make them more “readable”, and also what might be too much “moral” when using your own life to set an example for political or social issues.

In full fiction there are no rules, at least for me. So the research, the imagining processes, and then the writing itself tend to feel more like an open world computer game; you can roam freely through the language and only have to make sure that in the end, there is a good story to be read.

In your novels you write a lot about memory and the relation between place, language and memory. If you could give us a brief answer: What does memory - and writing fiction about memory - mean to you? 

Memories are what we are building our lives from – especially when getting older. They are the fundament of our nature, our fears, our love and loving, our joy and even lust. They can be home or horror. They can help us grow and hinder us. They are accomplices and burdens. And so much more. In writing from my own memories, I force myself to “deal with it”, deal with what was in order to understand what I am now. And, more importantly, to find pieces of my past which are worth being shared and retold: not because I consider them by themselves to be “worthy of narrating”, but because I often find things within that are “more than my life” – something I would like to know from others too. Opening memories to become stories is communication and exchange of a very rich currency: biography.

You write your novels in German. Was this a decision that you had to make, or did it come to you naturally? Did you ever consider writing in Bosnian or Serbian? 

My German is, pragmatically seen, the much better language; as an author that is what I need to be able to produce the best possible text at a certain moment.

You have a degree in Slavic studies and German as a second language - do you feel like the subjects you studied at University have influenced your writing, and if so, in what manner?

I have read a lot of Russian literature during my studies, which definitely helped me learn some aesthetic approaches to fiction, and the same is to be said about some German authors who I first encountered then. So, yes, there was some fruitful friction back then, and even though I believe to have found and established my own writing styles, I believe it helped me thrive to know “what else is possible”.

I know that you have been to the Reykjavík Literature Festival before. Do you have any stories taken from the experience of attending the festival that you would like to share with us? Were you introduced to any authors or novels that you did not know before the festival? Was there anything in particular that surprised you? 

If it were my decision I’d invite myself to RLF every time it takes place. I have travelled the world with my books, but feel nowhere as intrigued, amused and intellectually (as well as footballery) challenged as here. Stories, there are many. Some even never to be told! The best ones!

Do you have any advice for students or young authors who are taking their first steps in writing or publishing their work? 

Read, read, read. Research, research, research. Take your time. Write, write, write. (And be sure to have a plan B, because hardly anyone can live from writing alone).