안녕하세요~
오늘 저희 SBC 오전반 2주년 기념 행사가 있었습니다.
늘 그렇듯 배움과 즐거움이 함께한 뜻깊은 시간이었어요.
이번에 선정된 The Tigers Wife 를 읽으며 다시 한번 새로운 시작의 발걸음을 내 디뎠으면 합니다.

중국의 근대사를 지나 이제 발칸반도를 여행하게 될텐데..
배경 지식이 조금은 필요할 거 같아 간략한 자료를 올립니다.
읽는데 도움이 되었으면 좋겠네요.  

그럼 모두들 화이팅하시고 금요일에 뵈어요. ^-^

- For Discussion
- 유고슬라비아 해체 [출처: 위키피디아]
- Book Review [출처:New York Times]

-----------------------------------------------------
<For Discussion>

- Wherre was Natalias grandfather going?
- Does old age always harden beliefs?
- If you are making your journey in a hurry, you are making it poorly. Do you agree with the old men?
- What is the role of superstition in The Tigers Wife?
- Why do the people paint Bis the dog all the time?
- My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when theyre gone, were left with the concept, but not the true memory. Do you agree?
- But the greatest fear is that of uncertainty. Is the Deathless Man right?
- Once you put something into the ground, Doctor, you always know wherer to find it. What does the Deathless Man mean by this?
- Do you need to see to know?
- How does a small boy become a gentleman?
- Why, in Darisas dream, were the tiger and his wife always eating heads?
- What is the difference between the rituals of comfort and the preventive rituals that come at the end of life?



<유고슬라비아 해체>

유고슬라비아 연방 해체란 유고슬라비아가 8개 나라로 쪼개져 분열된 사건을 말한다.

유고슬라비아는 1945년 나치의 지배로부터 해방된 후, 티토에 의해 35년간 안정적으로 통치되었다. 그러나 1980년 5월 그가 사망한 뒤, 유고슬라비아는 집단지도체제로 바뀌어 각 공화국에서 차례로 대통령을 뽑게 되었고, 1989년 공산 정권들의 도미노 붕괴를 계기로 본격적인 분리 독립 운동의 막이 오른다.

유고내란
1991년 6월 25일, 슬로베니아와 크로아티아가 독립을 선언하자, 세르비아 주도의 유고연방은 독립 무효를 선언, 6월 28일 슬로베니아에 연방군을 진격시킴으로써 유고내란이 발발하였다. 처음 3개월간은 유럽 강대국들의 개입으로 휴전하였으나, 8월에 연방군의 크로아티아 진격으로 전투는 재개되었고, 내란은 유고 전역으로 확대되기에 이른다.

1992년 1월, 크로아티아군은 전열을 정비하며 반격을 시작하였고, 크로아티아에 거주하던 세르비아인들이 세르비아로 탈출하던 가운데 남아 있던 세르비아인들은 크로아티아군에게 혹독한 보복을 당해 인권침해 문제가 제기되기도 하였다.

1992년 3월에는 보스니아까지 내란이 확대되었다. 애초에 보스니아 정부는 중립을 선언하였으나, 이미 독립파(보스니아인)와 연방 잔류파(세르비아인)로 갈려 분쟁이 시작되고 있었던 상황이었다. 결국 보스니아는 독립을 선언하였으며, 연방군은 즉각 보스니아를 공격하면서 보스니아내란을 일으킨다.

한편, 계속된 내란으로 유고연방의 붕괴를 피할 수 없게 되자, 1992년 4월에 세르비아는 몬테네그로와 함께 신유고연방을 선언한다.

내란 말기에는 결국 나토가 개입하여 세르비아 폭격, 경제 제재 등을 동원하였고, 1995년 12월 14일 데이턴 합의서의 체결로 3년 반에 걸친 민족내란은 그 막을 내린다.

코소보 사태
코소보는 1971년에 구 유고연방의 자치주가 되었으나, 1989년에는 공산권 붕괴로 알바니아인들의 독립요구가 커지고 있었다. 이에 대해 세르비아 정부는 자치권을 빼앗고, 이에 알바니아인들은 1995년 코소보해방군을 조직, 세르비아 경찰에 대한 무장저항을 시작한다.

이윽고 1998년 2월, 코소보를 순찰하던 세르비아 경찰 4명이 알바니아 민병대에 살해되면서 급기야 전쟁으로 치달았으며, 이어진 세르비아 경찰의 보복 및 진압, 이에 대한 알바니아 민병대의 저항과 보복이 거듭되었다.

1999년 초, 코소보는 전면적인 전쟁상태에 빠졌으며, 평화를 위해 개입한 서방 6나라(미국, 영국, 프랑스, 이탈리아, 독일, 러시아)가 평화안 (1.휴전 후 3년 뒤에 독립 논의/2.코소보에 나토 평화유지군 주둔)을 내놓는다. 그러나 알바니아계는 독립시기 문제로, 세르비아는 주권문제로 거부한다.

이에 미국은 1999년 3월 24일 나토군에게 세르비아 수도 베오그라드와 코소보의 세르비아군 기지에 대대적인 공습을 지시, 결국 6월 9일 세르비아의 평화안 수용으로 79일간의 전쟁이 정리되었다.

1990년대 이후
이후 구 유고연방은 슬로베니아, 보스니아 헤르체고비나, 세르비아 몬테네그로, 크로아티아, 마케도니아로 쪼개졌고, 세르비아 몬테네그로는 2006년 6월 각각 세르비아와 몬테네그로로 분리되었으며, 2008년에는 코소보가 세르비아로부터 독립을 선언하였다. 하지만, 코소보는 거의 대부분의 국가가 인정하지 못하는 상태이다


<Book Review>

A Mythic Novel of the Balkan Wars
By LIESL SCHILLINGER

Think back to the wars of the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, with their profusion of names that are difficult to pronounce and acts that are painful to recall: the massacres at Brcko and Srebrenica, the bombing of bread lines in Sarajevo, the destruction of Mostar’s 400-year-old bridge.

None of these appear in Téa Obreht’s first novel, “The Tiger’s Wife,” yet in its pages she brings their historic and human context to luminous life. With fables and allegories, as well as events borrowed from the headlines, she illustrates the complexities of Balkan history, unearthing patterns of suspicion, superstition and everyday violence that pervade the region even in times of peace. Reaching back to World War II, and then to wars that came before, she reveals the continuity beneath the clangor.

A metaphor for the author’s achievement can be found in her tale of Luka, a dreamy, brooding butcher’s son from a mountain village called Galina. A decade after World War I, Luka leaves Galina and walks 300 miles to the river port of Sarobor, where he hopes to master the gusla, a single-stringed Balkan folk instrument. Arriving there, he finds that gusla music is nearly forgotten, overtaken by rollicking modern tunes played by lusty, boisterous bands. Still, he seeks out old men who know the traditional songs, falls under the spell of the “throbbing wail of their voices winding through tales remembered or invented” and acquires their art. Although his gift is for lyrics rather than music, “there are those who say that any man who heard Luka play the gusla, even in wordless melody, was immediately moved to tears.” When a woman asks why he doesn’t prefer an instrument with a greater number of strings, he responds, “Fifty strings sing one song, but this single string knows a thousand stories.”

The principal collector of Obreht’s multiplicity of stories is her narrator, Natalia Stefanovic, a young doctor who lives with her mother, grandmother and grandfather in an unnamed Balkan city early in the 21st century. Natalia likes to see herself as somebody with an edge: too rational to be cowed by old-fashioned superstitions, too modern for corny old-fashioned folk music. She prefers Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.

As a little girl, Natalia adored her grandfather, a respected doctor and professor, and tagged along on his regular visits to the zoo, which was formerly a sultan’s fortress. “Past the aviary where the sharp-eared owls sleep,” they would walk to the moat where tigers loped, their “stripe-lashed shoulders rolling.” There she would listen, rapt, as her grandfather spoke of a girl he once knew who was known as the “tiger’s wife.” At the time, Natalia thought this was a fairy tale. After all, her grandfather always carried a copy of Kipling’s “Jungle Book” in his breast pocket. To his granddaughter, he was a fount of fantasy, her own private bard. In “The Tiger’s Wife,” Obreht weaves the old man’s richly colored reminiscences like silk ribbons through the spare frame of Natalia’s modern coming-of-age, a coming-of-age that coincides, as her grandfather’s had, with a time of political upheaval.

When Natalia is a teenager, war returns to the Balkans. The zoo closes, and a curfew is imposed. Natalia and her friends immerse themselves in “the mild lawlessness” that surrounds them. Among other things, this means spurning her grandfather and dating a young tough who sells black-market contraband. But late one night, missing the old man, she agrees to follow him on a wild goose chase whose purpose he won’t explain.

After following him through dark, empty streets, suddenly she sees what he sees: an elephant, a refugee from a defunct circus, being walked to the city’s embattled zoo. “None of my friends will ever believe it,” she exclaims in regret. “You must be joking,” her grandfather replies, rebuking her: “The story of this war — dates, names, who started it, why — that belongs to everyone. Not just the people involved in it, but the people who write newspapers, politicians thousands of miles away, people who’ve never even been here or heard of it before. But something like this — this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. . . . You have to think carefully about where you tell it, and to whom. Who deserves to hear it?” Chastened, Natalia asks if he has other stories “like that,” stories “from before.” The question will transform her into a bard herself.

Ingeniously, Obreht juxtaposes Natalia’s matter-of-fact narration with contemporary folk tales that are as simple, enthralling and sometimes brutal as fables by Kipling or Dinesen. Soon after the war, the adult Natalia adds to this trove as she travels with a fellow doctor on a mercy mission to a town across the new border to inoculate orphans — orphans who have been created, she knows, “by our own soldiers.” “Twelve years ago,” she explains, “before the war, the people of Brejevina had been our people.” Back then, crossing borders was a formality, but now an unwary welcome is out of the question. Still, the family that plays host to the doctors treats them to a generous feast and takes care not to mention politics, religion or family matters. Nor do they explain the presence of a band of strange, sickly people roaming their property, digging holes day and night.

The diggers, Natalia learns, are hunting for the buried corpse of a relative who died without proper rites, whom they believe is blighting their family from the grave. They have come to Brejevina to right that wrong and expunge the curse. Sensible, educated Natalia finds that she can’t scorn their conviction. In fact, she has family rites of her own to attend to, a detour she must make to placate her grandmother. It’s on the drive back from this detour that Natalia recalls her grandfather’s story of Luka.

By this time, though, she has learned that neither Luka nor the tiger’s wife were characters from fairy tales. They were real people who lived in the village of Galina, the birthplace not only of Luka but of Natalia’s grandfather. The tiger who gave the “tiger’s wife” her name was real too: he made his way to Galina in 1941, spooked by bombs that fell on a Balkan city. In the woods above her grandfather’s village, Natalia tells us, the sound of the animal still vibrates amid the trees, a “tight note that falls and falls.” Arrestingly, Obreht shows that you don’t have to go back centuries to find history transformed into myth; the process can occur within a lifetime if a gifted observer is on hand to record it.

Téa Obreht was born in Belgrade in 1985 but left at the age of 7, before the major conflict took hold. She lived in Cyprus and Egypt, then moved to the United States in 1997. In other words, she did not live in the former Yugoslavia during the war-torn years this book revisits. Filled with astonishing immediacy and presence, fleshed out with detail that seems firsthand, “The Tiger’s Wife” is all the more remarkable for being the product not of observation but of imagination.

For Obreht, the mind’s witness is more than equal to the eye’s. And her narrator, in retelling the experiences of her grandfather’s generation, enfolds them into her own. As his vision joins hers, old and new memories collide in a vibrant collage that has no date, no dateline.