War and the City, Fantasy and Fact: The Siege of Sarajevo in Karim Zaimović’s Postmodern Short Fiction

This article analyses the posthumous short story collection Tajna džema od malina [The Secret of Raspberry Jam] (1997), written by Bosnian author Karim Zaimović (1971–1995) during the siege of his home city, Sarajevo. Zaimović, who died at the end of the conflict, depicted the reality of war by inserting clichés taken from genre fiction into a documentary‑like description of life in the besieged city. This procedure may be likened to the features recognised by Linda Hutcheon as typical of postmodern literature, which often applies popular fiction devices to historical content to make the reader aware of historical narratives’ socially constructed nature. Indeed, by mixing fantasy and fact, Zaimović aimed to deconstruct the besieging army’s propaganda and rebuild Sarajevo’s social tissue with the power of imagination. To better understand the author’s work, we will consider the development of popular fiction in Yugoslavia and the presence of similar themes in the works of other contemporary Sarajevan writers, such as Aleksandar Hemon.