Charmed, horrified in Bosnia

When Scott Simon arrived in Sarajevo in the summer of 1993, the city wasn’t looking its best. Glass had pulsed from windows to the streets, once solid buildings bore gaping wounds, those who could had fled the snipers and artillery shells while survivors roamed a seemingly post-apocalyptic world of the undead.

“People were eating grass soup, chopping down trees and furniture in their apartments and other people’s apartments” for firewood, recalls Simon, an award-winning National Public Radio journalist. “There was virtually no water, no electricity.”

Simon has reported from 10 war zones, but the Serbian siege of Sarajevo lodged itself in a separate compartment in his soul -- the place where novels are conceived and, with luck, force their way out after an unpredictable gestation.

In Simon’s case, the process lasted more than a decade, leading to his recent fiction debut, “Pretty Birds,” a work of invented characters moving through real conditions of relentless violence and deprivation, but also of intransigent spirit. Over a three-year span, more than 10,500 people were killed and as many as 50,000 wounded in an onslaught that damaged or destroyed nearly every building in the city.

“I had never before covered a war in a place I had felt such a sense of affinity with,” says Simon, describing Sarajevo as a European melting pot with a soft spot for basketball and Croatian star Toni Kukoc, who in 1993 had recently signed with Simon’s hometown Chicago Bulls. “It was proud of being diverse and cosmopolitan and cutting-edge and interesting as a crossroads for people from various walks of life and various parts of the country and the world. They were jazz lovers and espresso sippers and theatergoers.”

Even while under a siege.

“Even if they didn’t have the espresso to sip, they wanted the espresso to sip. They were still talking about jazz and popular culture,” says Simon, who was in Los Angeles this week for public readings. “The sense of humor in Sarajevo under the siege had a kind of ironic, wry and delightful quality that great cities have.... I had never covered a story that moved me as deeply or, in a sense, taught me as much as Sarajevo did.”

The transition from journalist to novelist is not all that rare -- in some notorious instances they overlap in career-ending fashion. But for Simon, writing a novel completes a circle, one that began as a high school infatuation with the works of Norman Mailer and James Agee but that turned into a journalism career in which he has won nearly every major radio award.

Simon has also written two nonfiction books, “Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball” in 2002 and “Home and Away: A Memoir of a Fan” in 2000. But he felt a novel would provide a better vehicle for exploring the lives of people under a sanity-threatening siege in which waiting for water was a gamble on whether you could reach the head of the line before a mortar shell fell.

“Novels can reach people at a level that nonfiction and even reporting doesn’t,” says Simon, his graying hair offsetting a boyish smile. “Novels have a shelf life that nonfiction and reporting doesn’t have frequently. And to be sure, I wanted to create a challenge. There are few accomplishments I admire more than a good novel, and I wanted to see if I could write one.”

Early reviewers think he has. Publishers Weekly, the leading industry source for advance reviews, lauded “Pretty Birds” in a starred review as a “deeply felt, boldly told story” written in “clean, forceful prose.” The Christian Science Monitor, one of the few newspapers to weigh in, gave it similarly high marks.

Simon is talking about the book from a rather exposed position on the top floor of an Old Town Pasadena parking ramp, awaiting a photographer delayed by the vagaries of a Los Angeles afternoon. The air is clear here four floors above the street, but dark clouds drench the mountaintops to the north and a cool breeze makes a lie of Southern California’s promise of perfect weather.

If this scene were part of “Pretty Birds,” it would be a place for a sniper to find a target, which forms the crux of Simon’s novel.

One of the givens of war is the jarring juxtaposition of the ordinary and the surreal, so it’s not that much of a leap to stand here and talk of imaginary snipers and real war, of relentless violence and deprivation met by dogged resistance and hope.

Or of a teenage girl fixated on American pop culture, sex and basketball suddenly putting bullets through windows, the ensuing “mist” evidence of a hit.

“Pretty Birds” centers on the family of Irena Zaric, secular Bosnian Muslims living in the Sarajevo suburb Grbavica, and their flight to Irena’s grandmother’s apartment in the old part of the city as Serbian paramilitaries begin their campaign of “ethnic cleansing.”

Irena is a star of the Number Three High School girls’ basketball team, and before the siege was having occasional sex with her coach and sneaking cigarettes and beer with her friends whenever they thought they could get away with it.

As the family tries to survive the siege, unprotected despite the presence of United Nations peacekeepers (who were barred from firing their weapons), Irena is approached by the assistant coach for a rival basketball team, who offers her a job at the Sarajevo brewery, part of the United Nations’ pretense of normality. But there is more going on behind the thick brick walls than beer making, and Irena becomes trained as a sniper.

Simon says the character began with an interview of a Serbian sniper, a teenage girl who told him she “preferred to fire at people with brown eyes rather than blue eyes,” but that other elements of her personality were borrowed from other people he met, and embellished.

Yet at heart, “Pretty Birds” is a novel of a place and its people.

“It’s a love story to that city and that time and the people,” Simon says. “I hope people want to find out what happened to these people and what happens on the next page, and that the story goes on in their minds.”

Through Irena’s progression, the novel tracks the Bosnians’ resistance, augmented by jihadists -- Osama bin Laden makes a cameo appearance, as he did in real-life Sarajevo -- who moved into the void of European and American inaction and sought to give a sense of identity to people who felt abandoned: “For the first time in their lives they felt an attraction to the call that, in the end, ‘Europeans don’t accept you as Europeans, you’re Muslim just like we are.’ ”

Simon began thinking of writing the novel in 2000, when he got married and discussed with his wife what he wanted to do and what he wanted his “life to stand for,” which he decided was more than being a radio journalist.

“I don’t like the limitation of doing only one thing, and it was important to me to try to extend myself and try a variety of different things,” Simon says.

Though the novel’s background is the failure of politics, it is absence that propels the story, both in real life and in the novel. It is the absence of outside action, and Simon says it altered his view of the world. As the siege raged, Yugoslavia’s European neighbors, the United States and the United Nations stood by.

“It shook up my convictions,” Simon says. “I had always believed that since the Second World War, if we reported a story and the facts were apparent and the rest of the world knew what was happening, that the moral conscience of the world would be aroused and deployed to make a difference.”

But the world response to Sarajevo barely registered.

“By the time the conscience of the world was not only aroused but deployed,” he says, “much of the suffering and dying had been done.”

And now it’s left to the historians -- and the storytellers -- to preserve the truth.