Bosnia: In the Footsteps of Gavrilo Princip, by Tony Fabijani, Wayfarer: a literary travel series, Edmonton, The University of Alberta

Press, 2010, xxx + 226 pp., $29.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-99964-519-7 Tony Fabijani introduces his travelogue of Bosnia and Herzegovina as an attempt to tell the true story of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand while also telling a story about contemporary Bosnia: he uses the events of 1914 as a window onto the new Bosnia that emerged from the violent chaos of the 1990s (XI - XIII). Fabijani begins with two reasonable caveats: First, acknowledging that he might be accused of inaccurately depicting or romanticizing people and events long lost to time he focuses on the tenuousness of his conclusions. Second, he gives a warning to the readers that his book is not a scholarly work, perhaps implying that we ought to apply a more relaxed standard for judging historical accuracy and representation (XIII). The book follows the format of the introduction: divided on the one hand into a historical narrative about Princip based on well-known sources, and on the other hand, into the authors observations about Bosnia and its inhabitants today. Unfortunately, the present day is seen through a narrowly ethno-nationalist prism (he introduces locals solely by their nationality: young Serb, older Muslim, Croatian woman, etc.) resulting in jarringly xenophobic interpretations of Bosnians, their interactions with the author, and their country overall. The historical narrative is well written and cited, based primarily on Vladimir Dedijers The Road to Sarajevo (1966); The Sarajevo Trial (a multivolume account of the trial including Princips own statements); and Martin Pappenheins Dr. Pappenheins Conversations with Gavrilo Princip. On the other hand, Fabijanis impressionistic observations about Bosnia as he follows the steps of Gavrilo Princip (from his poor Krajina village to Sarajevo, Belgrade, and finally Theresienstadt) are fraught with problems. The most obvious -- and least understandable in an academic press publication -- are the numerous spelling and orthography errors in cited Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian words, titles, and phrases (Srpska Rije instead of Srpska rije, mistranslation of odlian as beautiful, bureki, Cedimir instead of edimir, hoa, Gako, etc.). Then there are glaring factual errors: throughout the text the author refers to the Greek Orthodox Church when he clearly intends to refer to the Serbian Orthodox Church. The intellectual and analytical problems are more troubling, however. The earlier warning to the reader does not excuse the nationalist xenophobia and crude essentializing on offer throughout the text. The authors friends and family warn him about the wild country he is going into, even being afraid for his well being in Bosnia (127-8). However, If you look for the bad in people expecting to find it, you surely will. Fabijani approaches Bosnia and its inhabitants expecting to find nationalism and violence, and he surely does. Even when the person he encounters does not display any hostility or nationalist sentiment, the author later reinterprets what they must have meant, in part because he is unwilling to accept any explanation that is not based on ethno-nationalist identification. For example, when a young Serb tells Fabijani that he liked the pre-war Doboj better because now the outsiders came in and that has changed the atmosphere [in the town], at first Fabijani interprets this encounter correctly: The young man

was more interested in having his old friends back than living in an ethnically uniform town with many rural refugees, a common complaint of urban youth in Bosnia. But,even in this case, the author manages to re-interpret these words to suit his blinkered ethno-nationalist preoccupations: A few weeks later, it occurs to him that the young man must have been referencing the returning Muslim refugees when he said outsiders (96-7). He even recognizes a Bosnian Serb by his accent (85), an impossible linguistic feat since Bosnian Serbs have the same regional dialect and accent as their neighbors. It is equally unbelievable that in his trips throughout the region over several years, the author did not have a single positive encounter with a native: They are uniformly rude, aggressive, hateful of the authors self-identified nationality, suspicious, dangerous, or even malicious. And the author responds in kind: for example, by exchanging profanities with a man on the side of the road. In this episode, he concludes:
There are idiots wherever you travel, not only in Bosnia ... but I wondered whether this particular idiot was telling me something about his life, without really meaning to. How many others were there like him, living in a country still recovering from a war, guys with no jobs and nothing better to do than drink and harass people on the side of the road on a Friday night?

Lest I be accused of too nativist a perspective on foreigners travelogues, let me point out that to rectify the ignorance about Bosnia and its inhabitants displayed here does not require years of academic study and specialization, nor years spent in the library (as the author claims he had done), but merely a few introductory materials on Bosnias geography, history, cultural mores, Islam (and perhaps Serbian Orthodoxy), and the current political situation. To know what a Bosnian Muslim prayer looks like; to know that the Serbs have had an autocephalous church for centuries; to know that locals might not want to discuss the war or its causes and that the ones that do are not necessarily representative; and to know that however lost one gets on the road in Bosnia, there are no such unpopulated places where you will just disappear these are elementary facts that a tourist, let alone a researcher and a writer, must know. Fabijanis book had potential tracing the steps of a young idealist like Princip in todays post-war Bosnia could have been an interesting project but to compare Princip to the war criminals of the 1990s, to sympathize with Ferdinand and the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia, or to see Princip as merely a terrorist shows an ignorance of history, rather than a consideration of its traces in the present. The authors fault was not that he romanticized people in the past, as he suggests, it is that he lacks any empathy for Bosnians in either the past or the present. Unfortunately, even the value of the books historical narrative of Princip and the assassination is far outweighed by the faults of the present-day narrative, especially since that historical information can be found in English, in the three sources listed.