This reading group guide for Unspeakable Home includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Ismet Prcic . The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book. Introduction Having fled his war-torn hometown of Tuzla, Bosnia, as a teenager, our narrator, Izzy, found love and a measure of stability in California with his beloved. But his American marriage couldn''t survive his Bosnian brokenness, the trauma so entrenched and insidious that it became impossible to communicate to anyone outside of himself--even the person he loved most. Now, as he writes in the first of many courageously candid fan letters to the comedian Bill Burr, he knows he must try. Taking us through Izzy''s memories and confessions as he reflects on his bomb-ravaged childhood, the implosion of his relationships, and an agonizing battle with alcoholism, Unspeakable Home is a vivid and poignant exploration of the stories we create to hide the deepest parts of our identity from ourselves, as well as a hard-won, life-affirming promise of redemption. Topics & Questions for Discussion 1.
How do you interpret the Samuel Beckett epigraph in the context of Unspeakable Home ? How does it interact with the quote from Ismet Prcic, which is from page 254 of the novel? 2. Unspeakable Home is a novel that draws from the author''s own life. How does this knowledge affect your reading of the novel? Were there parts of the book that felt more like a memoir to you? How does fictionalization relate to "the nature of language" that Ismet refers to on page 13? 3. The book is punctuated by letters to Bill Burr, an American comedian, who the author thanks in his acknowledgments, writing "his work helped me get through the worst of my gutter days" (page 285). How do these letters change in tone over the course of the novel? 4. "Homo Homini Home Est?" is a play on the Latin proverb "Homo homini lupus est," which translates to "man is a wolf to man." In what ways does Prcic explore the concept that man is a home to man? 5. Ismet describes how his short video "A Day in the Life of Homeless Man" closes with the quote "The perceiver and the object perceived cannot be one and the same" (page 40).
What is Prcic commenting on here? How does he differentiate between the perceiver and the perceived in this film, and beyond? 6. In "At the National Theatre," Ismet writes from the perspective of an audience member he once saw in a theater who disrupted the performance. At the end of the chapter, the man stabs an actor who mocked him, only to have the actor jump up seemingly unhurt, and then finally begin to bleed from his wound--but the knife is fake. How does this scene represent the Bosnian character''s relationship to America? 7. In "Bosnian Dream," Musa Music thinks, "Life, by definition, ends [.] It''s the show of life that must go on" (page 104). How does Prcic demonstrate and wrestle with this belief in this chapter, and beyond? 8. Think about other books or media that depict "the ole buggery of escalating into personhood in the upside-down morality of war" (page 220).
How are they similar to or different from Unspeakable Home ? What about other portrayals of the immigrant experience and "The American Dream"? 9. Izzy reveals that "the loop" is rooted in a sexual assault he experienced when he was very young. What are some other moments before "Bunnylove Savagery" where sexuality is depicted as ugly, shameful, or wrong? How does this revelation impact your reading of the rest of the book? 10. In "4. The Shannon Closing," Prcic directly implicates the reader: "This is why you''re frustrated reading this. Every time someone interrupts one individualized world to tell you of another means work for you. Nobody wants to hear about another person''s dream, for one. And two, nobody likes to be awakened from their own life, especially into another, just as loosey-goosey and tentative as the one they have to perpetuate to stay in" (page 248).
Do you resonate with Prcic''s assumption about what a reader wants? Why or why not? 11. Liner notes are the text on the insert of a record or CD. Why do you think Prcic titled the last section of the book "Liner Notes"? What about "The Bachelor Party 2.0" is reminiscent of the literal function of liner notes in music packaging? 12. The book ends with Ismet''s friend Ben holding up a board representing traumas and strivings that Ismet is to break--a way to visualize how "''you can train your brain to be happy.''" Ismet asks, "''Yeah, but for vhat reason is happiness . important. Vhat about truth?''" (page 284).
Which do you think is more important: happiness or truth? Using the book as evidence, which do you think Prcic finds most important? Enhance Your Book Club 1. Imagine that there is a vinyl called Unspeakable Home with a Side A and a Side B. Pick ten to twelve tracks for each side that correspond in some way to the content, tone, or themes of each side. Discuss your reasoning. 2. Choose a minor character in Unspeakable Home --for example, Beloved, Hunter, Uncle Bahrija, Gill, the she-wolf--and write a paragraph or two from their perspective. What opinion do they have of Ismet? What do they want for him in life, and how do they help and harm him? 3. Write a letter to a comedian, actor, or another celebrity about a way in which their work has impacted you.
Who did you choose and why? A Conversation with Ismet Prcic The title Unspeakable Home is from the Samuel Beckett poem "neither," which you also use as an epigraph. Do you remember when you first encountered the poem? What feelings does it evoke in you? Growing up a theater dork in Tuzla, I only knew of Samuel Beckett as a playwright for the longest time, and it wasn''t until I was in grad school and I took a class by the late, great experimentalist Raymond Federman (who was a contemporary of Beckett''s), that I discovered his novels and stories. He provided nimble insights into Beckett''s prose, and together with Federman''s own playful writings, encouraged me to play with language, story structure, to try things that are unusual, weird, funny, that fit some of my more, let''s say, performative and expressive natures. I was writing Shards at the time, struggling with my own experimental leanings, fighting off the good-hearted naysayers, people who were afraid the book wouldn''t work, and trying to keep as much of the crazy (faith) in. Federman shared an anecdote that once when he was rereading Beckett''s trilogy, he, by chance, encountered a perfect chunk of writing, that if excerpted from a dense, brick-like paragraph and broken into lines, would make a perfect, meaningful sonnet, and in the iambic pentameter to boot. He wrote to Beckett and asked for a permission to publish it, which was granted. Encouraged, Federman inquired to interview him too. Beckett famously replied with a postcard that said: "There is no inter to view.
" Shards was published by Grove Press, Beckett''s old publisher, which got me hooked up with that fancy blue box set of his complete works. This is where I alighted upon "neither," a poem that gives the title to Unspeakable Home . It promptly seared itself into my mind, because of its theatricality, its otherworldliness, its almost spiritual grace. I got to admit that the poem''s atmosphere is what I was thinking of when I was writing "Inside the Actor," though I couldn''t help infusing it with snark and attempted humor. In my search for the title, I went back to it, gathered that this human neitherness he so evocatively captures, especially with the part about the "two lit refuges," perfectly captures the duality of every refugee of war, as well as make a pretty sound metaphor for immigration which my work touches on for sure. Based off the citation, "Obligatory Warning" is from "Bunnylove Savagery, or In Place of an Afterword," but the excerpt doesn''t appear in the latter section. Why is that? Well, to tell you the truth, I didn''t want to repeat a whole chunk of text twice in the same book because when I did it in Shards some people were kind of complaining. It has to do with problems one encounters structuring an experimental novel.
As I was going through pairing down an almost 900-page manuscript into the first novel to make it more traditionally manageable, my teacher and mentor, Michelle Latiolais, suggested I excerpt a part of a chapter that shows up late in Shards and open the book with it, just to pull the reader in and show them immediately what kind of book they were entering. She cited the opening of one of Cormac McCarthy''s works that does that same thing and enlightened me on what it did for his book. But, like I said, I had readers ask why I was repeating whole sections. Mind you, Michelle was the one who told me to add my own quote after Beckett''s in this book, to frontload the attitude of the voice that is telling it and prime the reader for numerous narrators, points of view, etc. So, I agreed. Visually, it might look like I''m putting myself on the same level as Beckett there, but I''m not. It''s painfully evident on that page which one of us can express himself assuredly with style and who is . crying to his mommy J, as it were.
What was your day-to-day writing process like for Unspeakable Home ? Did y.