The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Fortress by Mesa SelimovicMichael Pinker
Mea Selimovi&Mac173;. The Fortress. Trans. Edward Dennis Goy and Jasna Levinger. Northwestern Univ. Press, 1999. 416 pp. Paper: $19.95.
What is the Fortress? To a Bosnian Muslim living in eighteenth-century Ottoman Europe, a philosophical and literal menace, a looming symbol of captivity. For Ahmet Shabo thinks—and speaks—dangerous thoughts, adhering to transcendent virtues which threaten to land him in the Fortress for good.
Shabo cannot shake recurrent memories of the brutal deaths of his comrades from Sarajevo, conscripts fighting in distant Chocim. Returning from this horror, he pursues work, falls in love, and marries a Christian. But rash outspokenness emperils his modest ambitions. Shabo’s headstrong denunciation of corrupt community officials to their faces cannot be condoned. Intellectual honesty and a passion for justice subdue Shabo’s scruples as repeatedly he mars his fortune by plain speaking. The Fortress, which becomes a metaphor for oppression and the snares of convention, speaks in the voices of men of power and position whose favor means a livelihood, but at what cost? Shabo wants no more than any other man—work, home, family—but his simple morality creates conflicts which he cannot evade.
Fortunately, Shabo’s integrity is championed by his faithful wife, Tiyana, who stands by him at every trial. He also gains a loyal friend, Mahmut Neretlyak, whose generosity and kindly concern survive all his own changes of fortune. Still, beneath the Fortress, this “insignificant scribe,” poet, and philosopher seems dogged by destiny as his character and circumstances conspire to ensnare him at every turn.
Through Shabo’s misadventures, Mea Selimovi&Mac173; portrays the plangent, eerily familiar destitution of a subject Balkan people tired of the yoke. He fashions a man so buffeted by war as to find ordinary life nearly unreachable. In disturbing echoes of the present day, Ahmet Shabo rehearses issues we live with now, in our apparently distant, transformed world, their somber litany a fitting testament to his creator’s prescience. [Michael Pinker]