Selvedin Avdić's first book was a collection of stories - Tennants and other Fantoms, followed by a tourist guide to the historic Bosnian town of Jajca and a factual account of Zenica prison. He works as the editor-in-chief of the online magazine Žurnal and also produces his own radio show. His 2015 non-fiction book, Moja Fabrika, is a history of his industrial hometown and the steelwork factory which dominates it. His second novel, A Drop of Joy, will be published in Croatia later this year.
"Longlisted for the Impac award, this remarkable debut illuminating the Bosnian war is like nothing I've ever read before. S 3 inShare Sometimes the only way to write about something horrible is to do it obliquely. In Seven Terrors we see the Bosnian war of the early to mid-90s glimpsed fleetingly, out of the corner of the eye, like a ghost passing between two worlds. I choose that metaphor carefully, because this is a book in which two worlds are often in contrast, if not in conflict: the living and the dead, the time before a woman leaves a man and after, the pre- and postwar world, the spirit and human worlds, madness and sanity, dreaming and reality, Muslim and Christian, Muslim and atheist. A bar owner, about to thump the drunken and abusive narrator, and relishing the moment, "was shining like a comet separating two epochs". There is even, mundanely, the difference between the way a radio station operated before digital technology, and afterwards. This recurring motif of division and separation, though, is not laboured; it's woven into the book's structure, but I'm not even totally sure that it's intentional. Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdic Buy the book Tell us what you think: Star-rate and review this book Which shows that the author is on to something, and not just by way of a metaphor describing a divided country. It's darker than that, with something of the nature of folk story thrown in, too. This is a story that starts off weird and gets weirder, but with the logic and clamminess of a bad dream. It's quite unlike anything I've read before, but it has all the consistency and force of something major and assured. (Remarkably, this is the author's first novel.) That it has room for humour is testament to Avdic's confidence. In a radio station logbook, we read: "In large letters - the existential wail: 'Does anyone know when we will be paid? Or at least, cigarettes?'" The story begins with an unnamed narrator, a former radio journalist, pulling himself out of a nine-month torpor following the departure of his wife. (His condition, in its indolence so extreme as to verge on the comedic, would appear to owe something to Beckett.) At the door is Mirna, the daughter of an old friend and colleague, Aleksa, who vanished in 1993. She has his journals, which begin abruptly in July of that year - he'd never kept any before - in which he recounts an underground earthquake at a coal mine he's researching for a story. He sees a djinn, or spirit, specific to mines, called Perkman (in Germany, he learns, he's called Bergmann), and is told this signifies either hidden treasure or a forthcoming disaster. Aleksa has to find out if he's going mad - to see whether or not anyone believes him. Soon the miners start to shun him; at first, he thinks it's because he's a Serb; but now he's seen the djinn, it seems they think he's bad luck. (And, of course, he's a Serb. But this remains unspoken.) The narrator, in trying to retrace Aleksa's movements, gets into stranger scrapes, but these are presented in precise prose. And there is method in the weirdness. At one point, an old miner who had barred Aleksa from going down the pit again starts talking about the "strange", "terrible" and "abnormal" things he has seen in the open pits. "How were they abnormal?" asks the narrator. "And what was normal during the war, fuck you? Tell me one normal thing!" The novel has endnotes, and further notes and reflections. The endnotes include a terrifically scabrous attack on, of all things, US Vogue editor Anna Wintour ("Her colleagues say she is a completely untalented writer, almost half-illiterate, insolent"). Seven Terrors is a bulletin from one of the dark places of the earth. (Avdic quotes Marlow's famous line from Heart of Darkness - "'And this also,' said Marlow suddenly, 'has been one of the dark places of the earth,'" which refers, chillingly, to London.) Some of it will give you the heebie-jeebies. And yet it is not without humour, or wisdom, or sympathy. It is the most extraordinary novel: and, as far as I can tell from its readability, very well translated by Coral Petkovich, too." Nicholas Lezard The Guardian, Wednesday 5 February 2014 10.48 GMT "For all its wry humour and playfulness, this is a deeply serious exploration into the legacy of the Bosnian War, in which the fantastic elements are representative of an historical trauma too awful to describe directly." David Evans - The Independent "The great read of the year for me, a book which manages to weave the mythic horror familiar from legend and modern masters of the fantastic like Bulgakov and Leo Perutz with the horrors of the Balkan war and human cruelty. A search for a an old friend who seems to have disappeared into the mythical underworld gets the novel's protagonist out of bed after nine months of bemoaning his wife's leaving him. His friend's traces get him in contact with the other kind of underworld and two of the most deftly drawn villains of contemporary fiction - the Pegasus brothers - lovers of death from childhood and ghostly white from head to toe. The book is an original and compelling approach to understand the way man can become a monster and then man again" Michae Stein - LITERLAB's as the best book of 2012 "On March 7, 2005 the hero of Selvedin Avdic's brilliant and captivating novel Seven Terrors decides to get up out of bed after nine months of self-imposed apathy as a result of having been left by his wife. Ready to return to life what he actually returns to is horror- horror in both of the above senses, or it might be best described as a place where wartime atrocities and ancient Balkan tales of spirits and demons blend together in a chilling Bosnian concoction." B O D Y - poetry. prose. word "Rarely does a book come along that sweeps you up into it's haunting, terrifying, surreal world and gain the status of unputdownable. Seven Terrors has the proud status of being one of them books and also has honours in sticking around and creeping into your dreams for weeks after." Martyn Coppack - Kafka's Cage "Seven Terrors is a mesmerising book, the first I've ever read from Bosnia and one of those books where the reader is never quite sure where the boundary between madness and sanity lies." Lisa Hill. Full Review at ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 'Surreal and compelling - a fascinating and disturbing insight into how lost a man can become when his life vanishes from under his feet.' Review by Stewart Horn, The British Fantasy Society
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