Madness Visible: A Memoir of War

...for us, her readership, that is. What strikes me most about this superbly-told memoir is the visceral reality with which author Di Giovanni succeeds in recollecting her experiences of the period and place with razor-sharp detail. Even more shocking once I'd learned (towards the end of Madness Visible) that she'd absconded alone to Cote D'Ivoire, Ivory Coast, of all locales to compile her notes and pen this book. For *that* alone, I think she deserves heapful praise; all the moreso in that the bombs began to fall in the Ivoreans own civil conflict at the time of her sojourn there. Yikes... Curious about this particular work is that Janine chooses to commence her account of the bloody Balkan decade with the NATO bombings of Kosovo in 1999. After a suitable reflection on the read, I have yet to figure out why that was the case...almost like we were going back in time with her -- or the experience which had a lesser impact upon her was delivered first. Theories all. Curiosity, it was. Merely curiosities. A frightening element which shines resoundingly through is the war correspondent's mythic love for the field of battle, almost as if the daily rush of adrenaline which war reporters mainline from conflict zones around the globe is like the elixir of their lives, their consummate vice in a manner of speaking. I've heard about this several times before, by reading other sources and listening to speeches given my those who've passed thorugh bloody battlefield hells, and am fully cognizant of the phenomenon. Di Giovanni makes no bones about the ravages of it, and is forthright with her admission that "it was only possible to love one war," quoting the immortal words of Spanish Civil War correspondent Martha Gellhorn. That's a statement, if I've ever heard one before. As I flipped through page after captivating page, my mind drifted back to thoughts of the year 1984, the Winter Olympics in the Bosnian capital, and how only a decade (or less) previous, the world banded together on those same majestic slopes surrounding Sarajevo (in Pale, for instance) in an act of peace, harmony, and amateur sport. Positively nightmarish it might have been for some of the athletes to have returned to witness the aftermath of the carnage. A stray thought which came to mind as I pondered the read. Di Giovanni is a very talented scribe with a flair for narrative. I hope to read more of her stuff in other places, and I will certainly be keeping an eye out for her. Kudos on the tip for the Richard Holbrooke book. I've already added it to my library.

Madness Visible is a powerful and extremely moving account of war. It reads like a novel, but its not and this is also why it's so harrowing. So much is contained in a sentence, on a page (action, danger , fear , sorrow) that sometimes you feel compelled to put it down and re-read the passage over, just to be able to take it all in. Janine di giovanni is able to give us unobstructed access to the frontline of war.Is it possible that human beings in our world should continue to be subjected to so much madness and suffering?

Perhaps the most bizarre incident recounted in Janine di Giovanni's tales of war comes at a time of peace. She is in Sarajevo, six years after the end of the war, and a radio station in Cape Town wants to interview her about a piece she has written for her newspaper, the Times. To her horror the interviewer asks her about snipers and aid convoys, as though the Bosnian war was still in full swing. The fact that it had ended had simply passed the South African by. "It was my obsession," she writes, but not that of others. So this is a book about di Giovanni's obsession. The Yugoslav wars, or at least the Bosnian and Kosovo chapters of it. This is compelling reportage at its best. Grisly and depressing at times, of course, but also most revealing too. As reporting wars and how to do it, becomes, in the wake of Iraq, ever more a subject of discussion, di Giovanni is brave to admit that she for one does not believe in objectivity. Discussing the siege of Sarajevo which lasted from 1992 to 1995, she writes: "We were guilty, we knew, of perhaps only covering one side of the war, but for us there was only one side: the side that was getting pounded, that was being strangled slowly, turning blue and purple." That side was the Bosnian Muslim side, and those Serbs who always said that they were "demonised" by the international media will see vindication in these words. After all, they will point out, Alija Izetbegovic, the then leader of the Bosnian Muslims was being investigated for war crimes by The Hague war crimes tribunal when he died in 2003 di Giovanni does not talk of Muslim crimes. But, as she says, "the truth wasn't necessarily objective; it was where we were sitting, what we were seeing." And she was seeing civilians cut down by Serbian snipers and old people literally freezing to death in a nursing home. The book begins with the Kosovo war in 1999, moves on to Milosevic's Serbia in the months afterwards and then flashes back to the Bosnia of the early 1990s. There are telling chapters exploring the minds of two key Bosnian Serb leaders, the Shakespearean scholar Nikola Koljevic, who made his own tragedy before killing himself, and Biljana Plavsic who, racked by remorse, unusually pleaded guilty to war crimes at The Hague. Di Giovanni recalls that the doyenne of a previous generation of war reporters, Martha Gellhorn, once said, referring to the Spanish Civil War, that "it was only possible to love one war" and the rest became duty. Di Giovanni would have us believe that Yugoslavia was her greatest love and that Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Iraq and the all the other places she has reported on were duty. In fact, reading between the lines, the true love seems to have been Sarajevo and Bosnia. If so, then even Kosovo was duty - but she does write about it well. A good book and a great read.

Di Giovanni shows war from a deeply personal perspective; there are few books that bring the horror so vividly to life. The most harrowing stories in this book are particularly devastating to me as a German reader: it seems there were few lessons learnt from WW2, and no end to the atrocities human beings can inflict on each other. Di Giovanni deals sensitively with a difficult subject matter, and illuminates its historical context brilliantly.

An unflinching and gripping portrayal of the Balkan War, Janine di Giovanni's book shows us just how quickly normality can descend into madness, propeling a civilised society into brutal mayhem. One becomes so engrossed in this book, listening to the victims as they lay their stories bare, it is easy to forget that di Giovanni herself was on the front line, narrowly escaping death a few times. The stories she tells are unforgettable (the rape victims, Koljevic, the Shakespeare scholar who became Milosevic's puppet, Biljana Plavsic, the Iron Lady of the Balkans) the images she conjures powerful and haunting. A must read.