Review by New York Times Review
IN PEACETIME WE enjoy the luxury of imagining our private experiences are separate from public history. We consume the news of wars, regime changes and assassination plots with our morning coffee but consider ourselves, our families and our relationships as self-contained worlds. This luxury was never available to Nina Bunjevac. In her graphic memoir, "Fatherland," she tells the story of a family torn apart by nationalism and historical trauma. Bunjevac was born in Canada in 1973 to a family of Serbian immigrants. In 1975, her mother took two of her children back to Yugoslavia. She was escaping Bunjevac's father, Peter, whose involvement with Freedom for Serbian Fatherland, a radical nationalist group, made her fear for her children's safety. While Bunjevac, her sister, Sarah, and their mother were staying with Bunjevac's grandparents in Zemun, Peter died in an explosion in a Toronto garage, where he and two other men were building a bomb. Bunjevac begins and ends the book with the images of birds - a framing device that evokes migration, instability and the cruelty of nature. Yet, her drawing style - with its scrupulous attention to photographic likeness, its uniform crosshatching and thick black outlines - makes her human characters appear solid and substantial; their movements and postures expressive in a deliberate, economical way that recalls the work of Joe Sacco. Bunjevac comes from a family of strong-willed people, and two members particularly stand out: her practical, principled grandmother and Peter, her troubled father. Sections of the book drawn from Bunjevac's childhood memories and photographs are especially vivid; she sparingly, yet authentically depicts the fashions, interiors and streetscapes of the 1970s Canadian and Yugoslavian towns. The faces of children and adults bear a touching family resemblance: thin lips, heavy chins, wide foreheads. In just a few frames, Bunjevac captures the essence of several relationships: an uneasy bond between her strong, overbearing grandmother and her more fragile mother; sibling rivalry between herself and her sister, Sarah; grown-up tension reaching the children through overheard conversations. In one panel, Sarah is having a birthday party, while in the next room, an argument about Peter erupts among adults. "You are worse than Hitler!" the girls' uncle shouts at their grandmother as Sarah is about to blow out her birthday candles. Some of the strongest storytelling in "Fatherland" happens when Bunjevac shows historical events through the lives of individuals. Her hard-drinking, temperamental father causes the family nothing but grief, and seems hardly worthy of empathy. But as Bunjevac tells the story of an isolated, desperate man who lived a life of near-continuous misfortune, trapped by a combination of historical forces and poor personal choices, he emerges as a tragic figure. Another plotline follows Bunjevac's paternal grandfather, who was born in Indiana but returned to his ancestral village in Yugoslavia after he was stricken with polio. He recovered but turned to drink. Drafted just before the start of World War II, he was captured by the Ustasha, the Croatian fascist militia, and ended his life in a concentration camp at Jasenovac. His son, Peter, grew up under the German occupation, and lost his mother after the war. Progressively more emotionally disturbed after each loss, he was shipped off to a military school and later arrested and jailed for three years for anti-Tito political graffiti. IN TELLING the story of her family to an American audience Bunjevac faces a challenge: It is likely that most readers are only vaguely familiar with the complicated history of the Balkans, which is key to understanding her father's evolution into a Serb nationalist. Her solution is to intersperse her family's story with maps and general history. These digressions succeed when they connect naturally with the surrounding story. For example, when she tells of her grandfather's fate in World War II, she explains the treatment of Serbian prisoners in Jasenovac camps (she includes the gruesome drawing of a "Serbosek," a hand-held weapon literally translated as "Serbocut"). The historical passages are less successful when Bunjevac reaches further back in time, beyond the family's story, as when she explains the common ethnic and cultural origins of the Serbs and Croats and the roots of their eventual antagonism. Here she crams too many names, facts and political personalities into a few pages - like the section explaining the history of Freedom for Serbian Fatherland - making them read as overgrown footnotes. This is not an easy problem to solve. Some of this information could have been integrated into the family story, and illustrated with specific examples. But some must stand on its own, and perhaps these events could have been expanded into their own sections. It seems Bunjevac felt compelled to fit these facts into a few pages in order to preserve the narrative balance, to keep "Fatherland" focused primarily on family. The ending, culminating with Peter's death, seems somewhat rushed as well. Bunjevac was in Yugoslavia at the time of the explosion, and her knowledge of the circumstances of her father's death and the time preceding it is limited to just a few facts and her parents' carefully phrased letters. But it would be interesting to learn what happened to the family after Peter died. "Fatherland" opens with Bunjevac, now an artist, living in Toronto. Did the entire family return to Canada? What happened to the grandparents? To Sarah? What was the experience like for Bunjevac's brother, who'd stayed with his father throughout his darkest days as his mother and sisters escaped? Ultimately, this is a beautiful, sad and necessary book - I only wish it were longer. ANYA ULINICH is the author, most recently, of "Lena Finkle's Magic Barrel," a graphic novel.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 8, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Bunjevac's graphic memoir encapsulates the stormy course of twentieth-century Serbia through the tragic experiences of her family. The first part, set in 1975, recounts the stormy marriage of her parents: in 1975, her mother fled her home in Canada, taking her two daughters back to Yugoslavia to escape her husband, Peter, a Serbian nationalist involved in a terrorist group planning bomb attacks on Yugoslav embassies in North America. The second part depicts Peter's childhood under Nazi occupation during WWII his father died in a concentration camp and his life as a dissident under Tito's Communist regime, which imprisoned him for espionage. After his release, he immigrates to Canada, marries Bunjevac's mother, whom he met as a pen pal, and begins the political course that will lead to his violent demise. Bunjevac tells the story through heavily crosshatched and stippled black-and-white drawings that are all the more effective for their quiet understatement. Her masterfully told saga powerfully demonstrates how the political becomes personal by showing the devastating effects of world events on one woefully broken family.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bunjevac's debut graphic novel is a fascinating, eerie memoir of her fraught family history of exile and immigration, focusing on her father's involvement in a violent Serbian nationalist group that, in the 1970s, attempted to overthrow the Communist regime in Yugoslavia. The author herself appears as only a peripheral character, mostly as a small child. The central figures of the story are her parents, and she follows them as they face difficult challenges, such as extricating themselves from the terrorist group, and being forced to sacrifice one child for the sake of the others. The book is heavy on narration, and since the action spans many locations and decades of Nina's family history, sometimes it's difficult to get to know any character very well. Yet Bunjevac is masterful at presenting an impression of the confusion, disruption, and fear ingrained in the family. The illustrations are unusual and extraordinarily rendered. Most are stiff and ominous, like lost photographs, the cross-hatching so tight and even that the figures look like they are molded from snakeskin-a very effective manifestation of the darkness and distance of the book. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An ambitious graphic memoir that succeeds on a number of different levels.Born in Canada, raised in her family's native Yugoslavia and having returned to Canada, Bunjevac (Heartless, 2012) addresses the history of a troubled region that brought her to where she isboth in the book (which finds her reminiscing from her home in Toronto and conjuring a past she didn't experience firsthand) and in her life. The title has dual meanings, as "fatherland" refers to the country of Yugoslavia, where German occupation gave way to communist rule and where Serbs and Croats experienced continual tension despite similar roots. The country no longer exists. Neither does the author's father, as she tries to penetrate the mysteries of this particular "fatherland." A Serbian nationalist committed to overthrowing the communist leader Josip Broz Tito, he had been imprisoned in his native Yugoslavia and exiled to Canada upon release, never allowed to return to his fatherland. He became involved with a terrorist organization operating throughout North America, targeting those who supported the Yugoslavian government, and he died in an explosion in the garage where the sect had been manufacturing bombs. By this point, the author and her mother had returned to Yugoslavia, fleeing from the man who had become dangerous, erratic and increasingly alcoholic ("Dad is a nervous wreck. At this time he is certain that he's being followed"). Thus, the narrative artistry must reconstruct not only the father's life before and after his family left him, but the decades (even centuries) of Balkan history that led them all to this juncture. That it covers so much in such a short memoir, and in such compelling and provocative fashion, attests to the author's mastery over such powerful material. The personal perspective humanizes historical currents that might otherwise seem abstract and inexplicable to American readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
