Ismet Prcic's brilliant and provocative debut novel, Shards, is about a young man, also named Ismet Prcic, who has fled war-torn Bosnia and is now struggling to reconcile his past with his present life in California. He is advised that in order to move forward, he should "write everything," and the result is a great rattlebag of memories, confessions, and fictions: sweetly humorous recollections of Ismet''s childhood in Tuzla appear alongside anguished letters to his mother about the challenges of life in this new world, both of which are complicated by stories from the point of view of another young man--real or imagined--named Mustafa, who stayed back in Bosnia to fight. This is a thrilling read, remarkable for the propulsive energy of Prcic''s voice, and the fresh eye with which he recounts Ismet''s--and Mustafa's--experiences. Shards opens with Ismet's arrival in America, aboard a KLM flight loaded with passengers--refugees--who rely on him to translate announcements from the flight crew and who have also flown away to escape the massacres happening in their homeland at the hands of the Serb paramilitaries and Yugoslav People's Army. His ticket out came in the form of a temporary visa he received to go to Edinburgh to perform with his experimental theatre troupe at the Fringe Festival---once there, he made a daring getaway, and after a series of close calls, he finally finds himself en route to America. He's left behind his younger brother, his unfaithful father, his anxiety-ridden mother, and his girlfriend Asya. We then flash back to Ismet's childhood, and the beginning of the conflict when Ismet's family can no longer travel to their country house, which is surrounded by Serbian families who had begun to threaten and jibe Ismet's mother. And when TV reports cover the destruction of the Croatian town, Vukovar, just a little north of their hometown of Tuzla, and the family begins to witness military mobilization within their city, Ismet and his brother Mehmed are sent away to their cousin Garo's house in Zagreb.
It's 1992. When the boys arrive, the house is already teeming with other relatives seeking safety. Mehmed and Ismet must share the add-on attic apartment with their cousin and his wife and daughter. A week later, their mother moves in just in time to watch their old apartment building come under fire. But their father is unharmed. After a month they move again, this time into the abandoned house of another cousin's Serbian neighbors in Djakovo. This too is brief, and before they know it, the whole family is back in their dangerous apartment, their nights full of explosions, glass breaking, neighbors' shouting, and missile sirens followed by frightened trips to the cramped bomb shelter. Ismet is now fifteen and decides to join an acting troupe to offset the gloom and fear of war.
Though his mother believes the quirky company director is a poor influence, Asmir gives Imset a shot at playing a lead role. Ismet also begins seeing a girl called Asya, with whom he falls desperately in love. With her he can still act like the kid he is, instead of the man everyone's trying to force him to become, even at the age of 18, when he's drafted in the army. He's told to report as an infantryman in 5 months. Terrified of dying, Ismet attempts to soak up as much life and knowledge as possible before he's whisked away to war, feeling better about death if he becomes more cultured, full of Pasternak, Pushkin, Dostoyevski, Bergman, Tarkovski. Soon after he receives his order, a shell explodes, killing his cousin, Garo, and 70 other souls, including a man called Mustafa Nalic--someone Ismet recognizes as the man who shot a rabid dog that had recently tried to attack him and Asya. Ismet becomes haunted by Mustafa--he sees him everywhere and inquires about his family, known around town as disturbed, but no one truly knows any of them. When Ismet finds out where exactly the family is from, a neighbor tells him that it wasn't Mustafa that was killed, but his brother, and that Mustafa is in the army.
Ismet leaves confused, but somewhat uplifted. At this time Ismet also gets word that his theater troupe is going to Scotland and passports are secured for the whole group. They make it to Scotland, but while there immigration checks up on them. Ismet panics that he'll be sent back to Bosnia and flees for his friend Allison's house. Allison is a Scottish actress who's working with Ismet's group for the festival. He pleads for her help and she and her mother decide to get him out of the country. They bring him to a mosque where he receives legal assistance and makes his way to Croatia. With the help of his cousins there, he secures a room with an old woman called Mina who houses other illegals.
They help him fill out immigration forms to eventually get to America. As we experience the scenes from Ismet's past and present, we gain insight into his fraying mind through journal entries addressed to his mother. After two years of living in Thousand Oaks with his uncle, Ismet cannot stand to stay and moves out on his own, if only 5 minutes away. But from the start Ismet's (known as Izzy in the States) writing is desperate and afraid. He doesn't have enough money, he's rapidly losing weight, he avoids his uncle--his only family--he can't sleep, and he's seeing a shrink who's diagnosed him with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dementophobia, fear of going insane. Though he's attempting to get his degree, he's haunted by phantom noises of shells and other artillery, and by memories that may or may not be his own. And he's distracted by an American girl, Melissa, who drives like a lunatic and eventually refuses his marriage proposal, breaking up with him over after claiming to find drugs and motel receipts in his pockets. Not to mention the continued visions of Mustafa.
His shrink also advises Ismet to write a memoir as a means to process and cope with his experiences in both Bosnia and the U.S., which is the text we've been reading. But he remains suicidal, and his pages are littered with the experiences of Mustafa, born and raised in the same village, but with a much different fate--he stayed to fight. Mustafa was born with innate fatalism and raised with a strict moral code. He too was obsessed with ninjas for a time. Not quite as "lucky" in love, Mustafa's only known girlfriend was a mentally disturbed fifteen-year-old who nearly shot him in the eye, and later goes on to kill her next boyfriend after he forces her to sleep with him and then threatens to tell her Muslim father. When Mustafa turns seventeen, he brings his papers to the military recruitment office.
By now he's utterly fed up with his dull life, his absent prospects. Suddenly he's overcome with the impulse to become someone new. He removes his glasses and adopts a devious sneer, he torments another boy with horror stories about how the needles they use to take blood can kill you, he farts at every serious moment, and when asked which branch of the military he feels most suited for, he jokingly answers, the navy--something Bosnia doesn't have. For his jokes Mustafa is forced into the special forces. His training lasts a mere 12 days and his uniform and boots don't fit. He's barely held a weapon and within days he's transferred to the Apache unit, a group of young kids with a death wish who are sent to the worst fronts and expected to die within 2 weeks of their first mission. A ragtag bunch, they go by nicknames alone (Mustafa's called "Meat") and have no real hierarchy. And indeed they are eventually ambushed a.