Porijeklo

Here's the thing: the country I was born in no longer exists. While it still existed, I considered myself Yugoslav. I was a child of a multiethnic state, the fruit and manifestation of two people who loved each other and whom the Yugoslav melting pot freed from the shackles of different religions and origins. My grandmother used to say – when I was ten or five or seven years old – that I would never cheat or lie, but only exaggerate and make up. I didn't know the difference then (I often don't want to know it even today), but I liked that she seemed to believe me. That morning before our trip to Oskoruš, she repeated that she had always known it: “Inventing and exaggerating, today you make money with that.” In his third novel, Origin, Saša Stanišić tells the story of his journey from his native Višegrad to Heidelberg in Germany and back again, to the Bosnian mountains, to his grandmother. Warm, wistful, witty and very colorful, it charmed the German audience and won the most important German literary award, the Deutscher Buchpreis for 2019.