reviews

Washington Post
Love Among the Ruins

I suspect I am not alone, even in this enlightened city, in not having understood the wars in the Balkans in the early 1990s. There were too many countries, too many factions, too much history, too many pieces to the puzzle. Now comes journalist John Marks with a brilliant, brooding novel that presents at least one corner of the Balkan war in human terms that make its tragedy all too clear.

Marks, now a producer with "60 Minutes," was the Berlin bureau chief for U.S. News & World Report in 1990-95, and he has mined those years well. His admired first novel, "The Wall," centered on the fall of the Berlin Wall. "War Torn" is a tale of two cities, Berlin after unification and Mostar, a city in Bosnia that was shattered by civil war in 1993. Marks thinks it obscene that, just as East and West Berlin were finally united, the lovely city of Mostar -- and much else in that region -- was torn apart. He sees, too, in the violence there a foreshadowing of the larger war that began Sept. 11, 2001.

Arthur Dove, a Texan like the author, arrives in Berlin in 1990. Previously a freelancer in India, he has been hired by Sense magazine as a correspondent. He meets Marta, a Muslim native of Mostar who lives with her husband and son in Berlin. She is beautiful, smart and troubled. Her husband cheats on her and, worse, wants to return home to open a restaurant, despite talk of impending violence there. He shrugs off the warnings, boasting that Mostar has always had "more intermarriages" than any other city in Yugoslavia. Arthur and Marta begin an affair. Many novels turn on whirlwind romances, often unpersuasively, but Marks makes us believe that, yes, this handsome, romantic, full-of-himself Texan could fall in love with this complex, beguiling woman and she could love him back. But she will not leave her husband, because it would mean losing her son, and she follows them to Mostar. Arthur continues to love her, even after he is living with a glamorous Berlin woman-about-town.

Three years pass. As civil war rages in Mostar, and Serb Christians are shelling their Muslim neighbors, Arthur receives a letter from Marta's sister. She says Marta has suffered terribly but refuses to leave. "She has no reason to stay in that city, except that her child is buried there." The sister begs Arthur to save her. He starts for Mostar but gives up after he is told that Marta was killed during a shelling.

In fact, she survived. We see the horrors Marta has known. "She had groped within the chest cavity of one of her father's old friends, hunting for shrapnel between his ribs until his breathing stopped. She had carried stretchers bearing half-naked women, their bodies covered for the sake of insane dignity by old newspapers. In the hospital she had waded through lakes of blood, blackening crusts of humanity, the stench." Her brother is a leader of the Muslim militia. One day he tells her the difference between the war in Sarajevo and their war: "Most of the soldiers on the ridges above Sarajevo are strangers. They don't know who the hell they're killing, and they don't want to know. Here there are no strangers. Here everything is local." Because of this, he warns, the former neighbors will go on fighting until everyone is dead. He is very nearly right. The ceasefire that comes is fragile. The United Nations pretends to administer Mostar, but a Serb warlord holds the real power. Arthur, finally learning that Marta is alive, hurries there, only to be caught up in renewed violence.

How does it end? Hemingway wrote the book, two books actually, on star-crossed wartime love affairs. In the first he let his hero's lover die; in the other the hero himself dies. There comes a point in "War Torn" when the question seems not to be "Can Arthur and Marta find happiness?" but "Can these people possibly survive this hellhole?" You must read the novel for an answer, but it can be said that the ending, as the lovers try to escape the murderous warlord, is nerve-racking.

A plot summary cannot convey the novel's depth and richness, for it is in large part a meditation on love and war, on how individuals and cities -- even a world -- are torn apart, then united. Arthur asks, "Why on earth should an insignificant Mediterranean backwater like Mostar be divided into East and West? It makes no sense unless something more vast and mysterious, more irrational and malevolent than human power is at stake." There are many such reflections, as Marks tries to make sense of senseless violence in the Balkans and elsewhere. He also provides welcome moments of comic relief. Most of it is in the person of Marta's cousin George, a gunrunner and hustler who always lands on his feet. "I manage midgets," he announces at one point. "They are beloved entertainers." There is also a subplot about Sense magazine's cutbacks on international coverage. Its publisher has revealed in a secret memorandum that "he has always loathed continental coverage, except for a few sentimental favorites -- swastikas, Communist spies, French actresses, German hygiene and the comedy of Italian government." Some journalists may find this grimly amusing.

Entertainment Weekly

As the former Berlin bureau chief for US News & World Report, Marks knows the political geography of post-Cold War Europe intimately. What's surprising is that he's just as adept at mapping out the emotional topography of living, breathing beings. War Torn follows magazine scribe Arthur Cape as he covers the German Unification and falls hard for a beautiful, but married, Yugoslav woman. Cape never quite recovers after she follows her husband and son back to their Balkan hometown. When the Bosnian-Serbian conflict erupts, Cape tries to reach her but finds that even love can't bypass the knotted religious/ethnic conflicts tearing up the region. Though War Torn gets bogged down in a muddle of belabored plot twists, Marks' reporter's ear for detail and his deft, nonlinear narrative make it a worthy meditation on the intersection of heart and history.

New York Times
Dan Kaufman

This crisp second novel by John Marks, a "60 Minutes" producer, traces the love life of Arthur Cape, a reporter who is flown from India to Berlin to cover German unification for an American newsweekly. Arriving two weeks before the end of East Germany, Cape falls quickly -- and hard -- for Marta, an unhappily married travel agent and nonobservant Muslim from Yugoslavia. Despite Marta's passion for Arthur (and the good life in Germany), her husband drags her and their young son back to Mostar, her hometown in Bosnia, and into the anguish of the Bosnian war. Mostar spans the Neretva River, and its two sides, a Muslim east and a Roman Catholic west, were connected for centuries by the Stari Most bridge, which was infamously blown apart by Croatian gunners in 1992. The author's depiction of the destruction of Mostar and its famous bridge is one of the book's sad highlights. Marks also lingers over Marta's decline; a once-proud, beautiful and successful woman is suddenly dodging bullets, scrambling for food, her teeth rotting. Marta's only wish is to find and bury her son, who is believed to be lying dead under the rubble of a destroyed hotel. As the novel builds, and the scene shifts from Berlin to Bosnia (and from romantic angst to the quest for survival), Marks artfully balances moral outrage with a quietly elegiac tone.

Publisher's Weekly
Starred Review

This complex, beautifully savage novel is well named, for every character in it is torn between past and present, between the promise of an adoptive country and the pull of a ruined homeland. Former US News Berlin bureau chief Marks (The Wall) posits that the collapse of communism ("the greatest hangover of the twentieth century ") in 1989 was but a prelude to yet another European apocalypse ("There was always this bloody shadow, this Bosnia... The entire world is waiting to turn inside out") and illustrates his thesis in harrowing fashion. Arthur Cape, a Texan journalist working for a flagging American news magazine, is at a Halloween party in Berlin in the mid 1990's when a ghost from his past makes an appearance. George Markovic, an ailing war profiteer who helped Arthur first settle into Berlin at unification, now comes bearing news of Arthur's lost Bosnian love, Marta Mehmedovic, whom Arthur tried to save three years earlier after she followed her husband and son home to Mostar, a bitterly divided city in Bosnia. Galvanized, Arthur immediately plunges into a Balkan free-fire zone full of demons under different flags, ("Arthur asked them who they were, and a host of cries rang out. They were Yugoslavs. They had fought the Germans. They had loved Tito. They were Croats, Muslims, Serbs, Jews, and Italians. Who cared?"), searching for Marta, who has been trying to salvage the remains of her family, despite her sister's dangerous dalliance with a local warlord. The language here is deliberately biblical, as Marks repeatedly intones the end of history and Augustine's vision ("The division of a city is a form of living death experienced by only a few places on earth. Mostar and Berlin are such cities... It is our endless Augustinian sickness, the City of God against the City of Flesh"). Marks's rendering of the period pulls no punches (paramilitaries reign supreme, the UN an impotent afterthought), and every principal is wrenched between flickering and insubstantial poles.


Library Journal
Highly Recommended

Appointed to his first staff job as a reporter for Sense magazine, Arthur Cape lands in Berlin just two weeks before German unification. A chance encounter leads him to Marta Mehmedovic and the love of his life. Marta teaches him a thing or two about both Berlin and Yugoslavia, her recently disintegrated homeland, before her husband drags her and their son back to Mostar-a bad move, for soon that city is tragically shattered by partisan fighting. Arthur gets conflicting information-Marta is dead; no, she's alive but her son is dead-before finally heading to Mostar himself to rescue her. Marks (The Wall), a journalist who served as Berlin bureau chief for U.S. News and World Report at the time of unification and also visited Mostar, has written a heartfelt and engrossing narrative that reads like a thriller but carries a great deal more significance. He's excellent at both the heartrending details of individual human tragedy and the larger considerations of what it takes to tear a city apart-and make it whole again. Writing about war can be tricky-is one exploiting human suffering?-but Marks instead illuminates. And he earns the note of hope at the end.

Rocky Mountain News
All is Torn in Love and War

Following up his acclaimed thriller The Wall, journalist John Marks launches a new story from Berlin. This time it's a romance, set against the backdrop of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Texan Arthur Cape has just landed a spectacular new assignment. Earning his lumps covering the economy in India on behalf of an international news magazine, the publication now offers him the opportunity to cover the unification of Germany at the end of the Cold War. Promised accommodations in the wonderful Grand Kempinski hotel, he quickly becomes disillusioned on two points. First, his regional supervisor will be heading up the unification coverage. Second, that supervisor has taken his room at the hotel. Adding injury to insult, Berlin is booked to the gills for the unification ceremonies. Through a series of events, Arthur meets a Balkan woman named Marta Mehmedovic, who is obliged by the circumstances to rent him a room in her apartment. She works as a travel agent, and lives with her husband, Tino, and little son, Pino. Tino is back in their hometown of Mostar on business when Arthur meets Marta, but Marta's sister Dubravka stays with them during her visit from Mostar. (Mostar was part of Yugoslavia at that time, but is now part of Bosnia and Herzegovina). A contentious love affair quickly develops between Arthur and Marta. Arthur falls for Marta's beauty and depth of character, enhanced by her historical sense of identity. Marta falls for Arthur, in part, because there are many reasons for her to abandon Tino. Chief among them is the fact that he wants the family back in Mostar, despite the danger of growing political tensions. When Tino catches wind of the affair, he tricks Marta into moving back home to Mostar with Pino. Arthur remains in Berlin, worried sick about Marta and Pino's safety in the face of unrest in the Balkans. Harrowing scenes of human misery and military violence confirm that war is hell, as the two struggle to survive and reunite.

Marks' five years as Berlin correspondent for U.S. News & World Report come across undeniably in the tone of international news correspondence that permeates his prose. At times, the writing feels choppy or oblique with curtly delivered sentences. At other times, Marks obviously enjoys the increased literary real estate offered by the novel format, and delivers generous passages of poetic description. Each character in the story is wonderful. Even the jerks are completely authentic. The reader will come away with the sense that Marks recorded these people, rather than invented them. The one character with the least dimension, ironically, is Arthur - presumably a semi-autobiographical character. Yet this feature may exist by design. Arthur finds himself swept up not only by Marta, but also by sense of historical identity present in the lives of all his European friends and acquaintances. A key exchange between Arthur and Marta explains the difference between Americans like Arthur and the Europeans he meets. Arthur begins: " . . . I mean, could you imagine disappearing in some big American city, like Chicago or Los Angeles, and starting a new job, with a new family, never looking back, cutting all contact with who you had been before? Could you imagine yourself as a new person?" "No, I cannot imagine it." He sighed. "I used to. I used to want to. Do you think that's wrong?" "I think it's impossible."

Unlike many Americans, with a seemingly endless capacity to reinvent themselves, the identity of Marks' characters endures changing circumstances because they depend on their origins. For these characters, who you are remains largely where you are from. This quality offers us opportunities for both sympathy and frustration. We watch helplessly as characters like Tino risk their own and others' lives in order to satisfy a sense of values that may be difficult for us to grasp. This theme of personal versus political identity repeats throughout the novel, aided by the metaphor of "two cities." St. Augustine's notion of the worldly Jerusalem and the heavenly Jerusalem extends here to East and West Berlin, East and West Mostar, and the divisions within individuals themselves. Thus, as the city of Mostar is carved apart by violent political forces, Arthur and Marta find themselves War Torn.

Booklist

When an assured stylist tells a compelling, morally charged story with political, psychological, and emotional layers, comparisons to Graham Greene are not entirely specious. Marks centers his story on the relationship of Texan journalist Arthur Cape and Yugoslavian Muslim emigre Marta Mehmedovic, thrust together in Berlin in the weeks before the reunification of East and West Germany. Arthur is easygoing, naive, with a vague faith in the future, adrift in a world of unspoken significance. Marta's nascent Western life is uprooted when her husband brings her and her son back to the town of Mostar, where the celebrated old stone bridge is fast becoming the antithesis of the Berlin Wall: an artificial link forcing together deeply divided peoples.

Marks' career as a Central European correspondent is evident in his mastery of place and moment, distilling evocative details into vivid zeitgeist snapshots. The tortuous, lost-and-found plot could do with a few less revolutions and a more fully realized conclusion, but, on balance, this is a smart, stylish read for both thriller and general audiences.

Mostly Fiction

"Cities revolving within cities, constantly arising and collapsing, the healthy giving way to the sick, the sick returning to health. And the people were like the cities, containing their own deaths, and within their own deaths, other lives, unexpected, as shocking as the fact of mortality." Within this engrossing story of love and war in Berlin and Mostar, Yugoslavia, from 1989 to 1992, John Marks considers the subject of divided cities-and the damaging effects on the people who live in them. The Wall dividing East and West Berlin has just come down, and Germany is in the process of reunification, attempting to erase the invisible walls still dividing the people of Berlin and of Germany as a whole. Arthur Cape, an American reporter for Sense magazine, has been in Berlin since 1989, when he arrived there from India at the age of thirty. He and Eric Hampton, the senior editor, have been filing reports from Berlin, documenting the story of the reunification and the surprises which have accompanied it.

In a unique and thought-provoking thematic twist, Marks draws parallels between what has happened in the division and reunification of Berlin and what is about to happen in Yugoslavia. As he recreates the ambiance of Arthur's day-to-day life and observes Berlin as the Wall comes down, his descriptions come alive, and the experience of living in a deadened, divided city haunts: "[In East Berlin] buildings were soot-caked and bullet-holed. Tenements had been left to disintegrate. Matter itself had been punished. The dilapidation smacked of Yugoslavia but in the neighborhoods of eastern Berlin, the ugliness verged on beauty, the survival of a city [which had been] annihilated." As Arthur muses on the philosophical implications of division and reunification in Berlin, he is also aware, through Marta's story, that simultaneous events occurring in Mostar may lead an inevitable and terrible division.

The novel gets off to a quick start with the appearance of the Halloween "revenant," and Marks's crisp prose and ability to select perfect, illustrative details advance the action and keep the story moving at breakneck speed. The peaceful reunification of Berlin offers a poignant and moving contrast to the growing violence of Mostar, with Marks presenting a clear picture of the conflicts through the action, never allowing the complexities of historical background to overwhelm his story. As bridges in Berlin are reopened, the parallel destruction of bridges in Mostar creates a heightened sense of foreboding and tension. Irony abounds, especially when a German, Hans Kreichler, becomes the European administrator of Mostar during a temporary cessation in the violence there. Most of all, however, this is a moving love story about two fully drawn people for whom love and war exist on parallel planes. As they struggle to reconcile within their own lives the tension between their hopes and disappointments, dreams and torments, and aspirations and earthly cares, the reader sees their struggle as a universal one-one waged by thoughtful individuals, enlightened governments, and philosophers and clerics the world over.

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