Why read How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone?

Book cover of How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone

Book description

Aleksandar is Comrade-in-Chief of fishing, the best magician in the non-aligned States and painter of unfinished things. He knows the first chapter of Marx's Das Kapital by heart but spends most of his time playing football in the Bosnian town of Visegrad on the banks of the river Drina. When…

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Literary fiction

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Why read it?

1 author picked How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Douglas Weissman

Author

On the surface, this book is about a person haunted by a single incident from their past but beneath the surface, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone is a gorgeous meditation on the moments in life that affect us, big and small.

The novel has a heavy subject but the stunning turns-of-phrase and imaginative world our narrator shares can make even the mundane and lived-in reality feel like the fantastical summed up in my favorite line, "Missing someone, they say, is self-centered. I self-center you more than ever."

From Douglas' list on feeling magical without actual magic.