The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo

This book should be read after "Safe Area Gorazde" in order to gain a context of the war (unless you're already knowledgeable about it, which I wasn't). This one has more psychological depth than "Gorazde". Many of the warlords who defended Sarajevo had criminal backgrounds and after the war the government tried to get rid of them, but they defied the orders. A few of them came to tragic ends. The "fixer" is a mixed Serb-Muslim guy who was raised as a Serb. The Bosnian fighters questioned his loyalty (apparently some Serbs who were non-separatist got killed indiscriminately in the war). But he's also revealed as often lying. In the war he was a sniper, often he had to make decisions of whether to kill someone or not, it's like playing god. I learned a lot about what war is like from this and other books by Joe Sacco.

Just to be clear, this is not a graphic novel, as some people are saying. It is graphic non-fiction, or graphic reportage, occupying a gray area somewhere between newsprint, photojournalism, memoir, cartooning, and essay. Sacco's first such book on Bosnia, Safe Area Gorazde, is a classic -- and those who found it compelling will certainly want to read this account of his 2001 return to Sarajevo. Aided by a Guggenheim fellowship, Sacco returned to do followup research and find old friends to see how they were getting along in peacetime. In his attempt to learn more about the siege of Sarajevo and the and its aftermath, he reconnects with an paramilitary veteran who had been his "fixer" on his previous trip in 1995. In war zones and trouble spots throughout the world, fixers are the oil that lubricates the machinery of international journalism. They are the ones who steer journalists to the right translator, hotel, driver, interviewer, clean hooker, alcohol, location, etc. -- for a few hundred in hard currency per day. Sacco's fixer was Neven, a Bosnian Serb who loves his city and fought in one of the many ad hoc brigades that were assembled by charismatic men in the early days of the war before a real Bosnian army was established.  An outsize character, Neven becomes a kind of lens through which Sacco tries to understand the war's very confusing impact on Sarajevo. The book hopscotches between various stages of the war and the present in a kaleidoscopic jumble of images, confusing nicknames, and impenetrable mix of fact and myth. Through Neven, Sacco tells the fragmentary tale of some of the more prominent warlords (almost all of whom were shady prewar characters), and of their sometimes heroic, sometimes despicable activities during the siege. To a certain extent, they are the subject of the book, populist characters who took it upon themselves to create personal armies to fight the separatist Serbs when there was no central government or army to do so (most of the Yugoslav army supplies were handed over to Serbia following the dissolution of Yugoslavia). Of course, many of these patriotic men were also probably interested in enriching themselves, and as the war dragged on, attempts were made to incorporate them into the regular army and police and things got rather messy. As Sacco recounts, many of the "facts" surrounding various killings, atrocities, and profiteering by the warlords will forever remain obscured by the fog of war, and the need for politicians to wash their hands of those dirty times. At the same time, what becomes increasingly interesting is the relationship between Sacco and Neven, and the plausibility of Neven's endless stories about what it was like "back then." Neven is a down and out character who owes money all over town, and Sacco clearly feels guilty about walking around with bundles of Deutchmarks, while his fixer is real-life war veteran. The subtle (and not so subtle) assaults on Sacco's wallet become a running th

A darkly violent Fellinesque riff on the Bosnian war, this "graphic novel," by Joe Sacco is a fast read, a noirish examination of the relationship between a parachute journalist and the necessary local 'fixer' who serves as a local contact and makes it possible for the journalist to drop into a foriegn country and get a story. In this case, the local turns out to be a questionable ex-fighter whose war stories are both more and less true than appearances indicate. The fixer, a troubled ex-fighter scorned by his former comrades and spurned because of his ethnic background, is a terrific character, evocative of both the unresolved issues behind the Balkan wars as well as the marginalized citizens anywhere made exiles in their own land.