Ismet Prcic's frequently brilliant novel in fragments, Shards, opens with a plane full of Bosnian refugees arriving at Kennedy airport. The 18-year-old narrator has escaped from Bosnia as a member of the Torso Theater, where he undergoes fanatically intense, quasi-religious rehearsals to the sounds of Vangelis, until his troupe is invited to perform in an Edinburgh arts festival. He escapes to New York and from there goes to Los Angeles, where he changes his name to Izzy, braced to encounter all the violent stereotypes of American movies.
Interspersed throughout Ismet's narrative are chapters from an alternate story about Mustafa Nalic, a 17-year-old who does not escape to America, who disrupts his military physical exam with a comedy of farting, who becomes a soldier as Yugoslavia rips apart, whose family is tortured by invading Chetniks, and who may be in a mental hospital at the novel's end.
Prcic warns, "There is no one solution. Everything's up for interpretation." Part One resolves on a thoughtful and haunting note, but Parts Two and Three, much briefer, are not so satisfying. The last 80 pages crumble into delirious fragments and hallucinatory confusion, culminating in a nightmarish hospital scene where there's no telling the living from the dead.
Prcic has pieced together a young man's story from the torn and exploded remains of his former life, and the sheer power of his language leaves the reader shaken. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle