Yugoslavia on the brink of the abyss

"I wonder if this is what certain French people meant when they said that art must position itself above the abyss," wonders Bosnian Nene, who is 27 years old in 1990, laconically, as he sees his artist's studio, installed in his parents' tool shed, half of which has collapsed into the escarpment leading to the river after a night of torrential rain.

That it would happen, the Italo-Bosnian writer Elvira Mujčić, author of The Season That Wasn't There, had let her guess from the very first pages. Ever since Nene, in the violet light of the late afternoon, had taken the bus back to her home town for the first time. After a few years in Sarajevo, where he had fled from his father's hostility, he had indeed had the impression that the distance between the abyss and his parents' home had diminished, and that it continued to do so in the days.

Thus the time for peace was also waning. The future of his country, Yugoslavia on the verge of crumbling, looms large and is reflected to some extent in the life of the young man, back among the seljaci - the peasants, but also the representatives of a backward, pre-Enlightenment world - without even having managed to graduate and therefore even more hostile than before.

Thirty-five have passed, thirty since the genocide in Srebrenica, and Mujčić too has stood on the edge of the abyss. He wanted to recount the failure of the socialist experiment from the very last months in which it existed, before the fratricidal war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, wondering when exactly the multi-ethnic and multi-religious state took a path of no return.

This is what Nene wonders, the artist who, in order to exorcise the end that everyone presages, but few can perceive as truly possible, has set out to be an archaeologist for the future, collecting what he imagines would have been the relics of a vanished country. Nene, who only in the end 'feels the need to become a young optimist, a follower of Ante Markovic or whoever proposed a broad and peaceful utopia, instead of a dark and deadly trench where one recites one's traditions by heart while waiting for a bullet in the forehead'.