In his turbulent debut novel Tijan Sila writes about a young boy in the Bosnian civil war, his escape to Germany and his life among German neo-Nazis. And about memory’s pitfalls.
Sarajevo in the 1990s: The city is under fire. How does a child experience war? Constant shelling makes it hard to swap comic books, the electricity keeps cutting out in the middle of playing computer games and the American soldiers will only play basketball in exchange for stolen porn magazines. Life is often dangerous, but exciting above all and never boring. The young first-person narrator wants to stay, but his parents can’t take it any more and are hoping for a new start in Germany.
After an unsettling escape by bus, the boy and his family arrive in Germany. His new friends are neo-Nazis or want to join the police – or both. Even his girlfriend from school, Sarah, with whom he lifts weights and has his first erotic experiences, has become a policewoman when he runs into her again years later. When a neo-Nazi beats him out of bed at night in the midst of an amorous adventure, she takes revenge for him. He hides from her the fact that he has committed burglaries – and that he’s wanted by Germany’s domestic security agency. And soon it begins to dawn on him that his traumatic past is determining his entire life…
Wild, with hopeful humor and oppressive precision, Tierchen unlimited tells the story of a young man for whom boundaries only exist to be overstepped.
