Pequeña guerra perfecta

Kosovo, 1999. On March 24, NATO launched a military intervention to halt Milošević's brutal ethnic cleansing. An air offensive, during which they promised no soldier would return home in a coffin. This is how it appeared on television screens around the world: a seemingly clean and impeccable war waged from the sky with diligent, surgical strikes. It ended on June 12. However, during those eighty days, bombs continued to rain down on Pristina. The city was surrounded by Serbs; no one dared move. In the streets, paramilitaries acted with complete impunity. And, in Elvira Dones's gripping novel, during those eighty days, in that same city, Rea, Nita, and Hana were trapped in an apartment, waiting. They had been celebrating one of their birthdays; now they struggled to survive, and the days passed in fear and weariness. At first, propaganda was the order of the day on television. They no longer receive foreign channels. Later, they have no electricity, water, or telephone service. Sometimes, they venture out to call a relative or try to cross the neighborhood in search of food. High-risk activities. They even come to feel that living or dying hardly matters; all they want is for it all to end soon. We are never prepared to read lines filled with scars, filled with the cruelty of cursed wars, because we are never prepared to consider human beings capable of such evil. Nevertheless, Dones manages to make us share in the courage of these three besieged friends, to capture their epic and moving story of survival; her work documents the pain of others and, aptly, places the writing on their side. With a sober and intense style, she gives the perspective of the besieged, who hear the explosives sent by their saviors falling. In this book, the words fall like bombs. One after another. Slowly. Silently. With precision.