Pretty Birds by Scott Simon

The author, a award winning journalist and contributor to NPR’s Weekend Edition, was a correspondent reporting on the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Based in Sarajevo, that experience serves as the foundation of Pretty Birds. During the Bosnian siege of Sarajevo, both sides used young women as snipers so that the men could be involved in the heavier fighting. Simon interviewed one such sniper and catalogued a ton of details about life during the siege in order to piece together a story on the plight of the citizens of Sarajevo.

The story is nominally about the struggles of the half Muslim Zaric family and their daughter Irena. As the siege begins, they have to flee their home and escape to the home of Irena’s grandmother only to find her dead in the stairwell, the victim of sniper fire. From here, Simon paints vignette after vignette of the minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, day-by-day life in a city under siege . . . from the horror of just finding water, scratching out an existence on bread with a side of snail and grass soup, to crawling through the apartment below window level (to not give snipers a target). Irena gets recruited to be one of the snipers and becomes exceedingly effective, killing targets while voraciously reading magazines about western culture and the slavic stars in the NBA. The title comes from the name of Irena’s pet parrot whose life first in a cage, then set free only to be captured again serves as an allegory to the life of the residents of Sarajevo.

While there is some semblance of a continuing plot, in reality the story (to me) is told simply as a series of loosely connected scenes to illustrate the horror of living in a siege from the viewpoint of civilians caught in the middle of one of the worst ethnic tragedies, at least in Europe, of the late 20th century. I was able to jump around the book and pick up what plot there was and not miss a beat. The plot notwithstanding, Pretty Birds is at its best as an opportunity for those of us lucky enough to not have been born there to glimpse at the individual struggles through the talented pen of one who was there.

East Coast Don