War and the City, Fantasy and Fact: The Siege of Sarajevo in Karim Zaimović’s Postmodern Short Fiction
War and the City, Fantasy and Fact: The Siege of Sarajevo in Karim Zaimović’s Postmodern Short Fiction

Summary/Abstract: This article analyses the posthumous short story collection Tajna džema od malina[The Secret of Raspberry Jam] (1997), written by Bosnian author Karim Zaimović(1971–1995) during the siege of his home city, Sarajevo. Zaimović, who died at the endof the conflict, depicted the reality of war by inserting clichés taken from genre fictioninto a documentary-like description of life in the besieged city. This procedure may belikened to the features recognised by Linda Hutcheon as typical of postmodern literature,which often applies popular fiction devices to historical content to make the reader awareof historical narratives’ socially constructed nature. Indeed, by mixing fantasy and fact,Zaimović aimed to deconstruct the besieging army’s propaganda and rebuild Sarajevo’ssocial tissue with the power of imagination. To better understand the author’s work, wewill consider the development of popular fiction in Yugoslavia and the presence of similarthemes in the works of other contemporary Sarajevan writers, such as Aleksandar Hemon.

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