Pretty Birds - Vendido!
by Simon Scott
Random House, March 2005
368 pp.
*** Vendido para Bertrand Brasil! ***
*We’re now into 4th printing for PRETTY BIRDS and have also just sold Australian rights to Hodder Australia.
The universally respected NPR journalist and bestselling memoirist Scott Simon makes a dazzling fiction debut. In Pretty Birds, Simon creates an intense, startling, and tragicomic portrait of a classic character–a young woman in the besieged city of Sarajevo in the early 1990s.
In the spring of 1992, Irena Zaric is a star on her Sarajevo high school basketball team, a tough, funny teenager who has taught her parrot, Pretty Bird, to do a decent imitation of a ball hitting a hoop. Irena wears her hair short like k. d. lang’s, and she loves Madonna, Michael Jordan, and Johnny Depp. But while Irena rocks out and shoots baskets with her friends, her beloved city has become a battleground. When the violence and terror of “ethnic cleansing” against Muslims begins, Irena and her family, brutalized by Serb soldiers, flee for safety across the river that divides the city.
If once Irena knew of war only from movies and history books, now she knows its reality. She steals from the dead to buy food. She scuttles under windows in her own home to dodge bullets. She risks her life to communicate with an old Serb school friend and teammate. Even Pretty Bird has started to mimic the sizzle of mortar fire.
In a city starved for work, a former assistant principal offers Irena a vague job, “duties as assigned,” which she accepts. She begins by sweeping floors, but soon, under the tutelage of a cast of rogues and heroes, she learns to be a sniper, biding her time, never returning to the same perch, and searching her targets for the “mist” that marks a successful shot. Ultimately, Irena’s new vocation will lead to complex and cataclysmic consequences for herself and those she loves.
As a journalist, Scott Simon covered the siege of Sarajevo. Here, in a novel as suspenseful as a John le Carré thriller, he re-creates the atmosphere of that place and time and the pain and dark humor of its people. Pretty Birds is a bold departure, and the auspicious beginning of yet another brilliant career for its author.
Reviews:
From Booklist:
Simon, Scott. Pretty Birds. May 2005. 368p. Random, $24.95 (1-4000-6310-8).
Irena Zaric, a high-school basketball star in Sarajevo, is more preoccupied with game strategy and an affair with her coach than with her Muslim ethnicity. But when the Bosnian Serbs begin their campaign of ethnic cleansing, Irena and her parents find themselves among throngs of Muslims brutalized and driven from their homes. They take refuge in her grandmother’s apartment and begin a regime for survival that has the father digging ditches for the military. Irena brings home beer and cigarettes from an ersatz job in a brewery that provides cover for a team of snipers led by Tedic, a Muslim with a knack for spotting talent he can use. Irena becomes disturbingly good at her task, growing a veneer of cynicism even as she pores over outdated Western magazines for fashion news and the latest antics of Madonna and Michael Jackson. Simon, who has covered the siege of Sarajevo for NPR, puts the events in a war-torn land into human perspective with memorable characters struggling with issues of ethnicity, survival, friendship, and betrayal.
Publishers Weekly:
PRETTY BIRDS
Scott Simon. Random, $24.95 (368p) ISBN 1-4000-6310-8
Young women served as snipers for both Bosnian and Serbian forces during the siege of Sarajevo; Simon, a prize-winning correspondent and NPR Weekend Edition host, interviewed one of them and has masterfully imagined her life. The book begins with half-Muslim Irena, 17, perched on a rooftop, wearing a black ski mask, sighting down a rifle and listening to a sneering Serbian propagandist on the radio (“The Yanks send you food Americans wouldn’t give to their dogs”) before she pulls the trigger. Simon then flashes back to the spring of 1992, when Irena, her parents and her parrot, Pretty Bird, must flee their home on the mostly Serb side of the city. When they make it (barely) to her grandmother’s apartment, they find her slain on the staircase. Simon’s account of the family’s refugee life—sans water, electricity and supplies, they eat snail-and-grass soup—is full of brilliant details ranging from the comic to the heartbreaking. When a former assistant principal spots Irena, once a high school basketball star, he offers her a job that quickly has her recruited, indoctrinated and trained in deception and weaponry. That’s when the action really begins to move along. Pretty Bird is released for mercy’s sake, flies to his old home and is caught by Amela—a Christian and Irena’s former classmate and teammate—who concocts a devious and difficult plan to return him to her friend. A deeply felt, boldly told story and clean, forceful prose distinguish this striking first novel. Agent, Jonathan Lazear. (May)
Kirkus Starred Review
A star is assigned to books of unusual merit, determined by the editors of Kirkus Reviews.
More civilians die in today’s wars than soldiers. But this extraordinary debut illuminates a time and place where civilians fought back: Sarajevo, 1992.
How do you write a novel about the savage ethnic cleansing of the Balkan Wars that isn’t unbearably depressing? Simon (award-winning NPR journalist) has the answer. First, you focus on a sidebar story, with a sympathetic protagonist (the movie Hotel Rwanda took the same tack). Second, you don’t minimize the horror, but you get the worst of it out of the way early. Sarajevo’s agony began in April 1992, when the multiethnic, cosmopolitan city’s belief that it was immune to ethnic hatred was smashed like an eggshell. The protagonist here, 17-year-old Irena Zaric, is a high-school basketball star. Her father is Serb, her mother Muslim; her brother is out of the country. The remaining member of the family is Pretty Bird, a beloved parrot with an amazing repertoire of sounds. Serb paramilitaries roust the family from their apartment building; Mr. Zaric is roughed up; Irena is raped. They trek to a Muslim neighborhood only to find grandmother shot dead; they camp out in her apartment. No heat, no light. Irena is recruited as a sniper by the wily Tedic, who, as an assistant principal, understands the adolescent: her athlete’s reflexes make her ideal. In a coming-of-age no parent would wish on his or her child, Irena asks the hard questions: What about innocent Serbs? How are we different from Serb snipers? But she overcomes initial misgivings and excels at her work, and the story zips along with crisp dialogue and plenty of gallows humor. Simon has an eye for the telling detail (the fascination with Western pop icons) and for the larger picture: the ineffectual Blue Helmets (UN troops), the shaky alliance between Bosnian Muslims and fundamentalist Arabs. He even manages a cliffhanger ending.
A magnificent tribute, not just to the Sarajevans whose siege Simon reported, but to the indestructible human spirit.
Advance praise for Pretty Birds by Scott Simon:
"Pretty Birds captures the impossible--the humanity of a teenage girl caught up in the madness and inhumanity of war. Scott Simon is a writer of great power." --Anchee Min, author of Red Azalea
"Pretty Birds marks the most auspicious fictional debut by a journalist of note since Tom Wolfe’s. This novel, about a wonderful teen-aged girl enduring the mad years in Sarajevo, is always gripping, always tender and often painfully funny. It is a marvel of technical finesse, close observation and a perfectly-pitched heart." --Scott Turow
"Powerful and riveting, Scott Simon’s Pretty Birds is the best kind of war novel: about the reality of war, day by day, about what it does to the human heart, and about who wins, and what that costs." --Alan Furst
Photo: Will O’Leary © 2005
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3874941
About the author:
Scott Simon, NPR Biography
Host, Weekend Edition Saturday
From Ground Zero in New York to ground zero in Kabul, to police stations, subway platforms, and darkened theaters, NPR’s Peabody-Award-winning correspondent Scott Simon brings a well-traveled perspective to his role as host of Weekend Edition Saturday.
Simon joined NPR in 1977 as chief of its Chicago bureau. Since then, he has reported from all 50 states, covered presidential campaigns and eight wars, and reported from Central America, Africa, India, the Middle East, and the Caribbean. In 2002, Simon took leave of his usual post at Weekend Edition Saturday to cover the war in Afghanistan for NPR. He has also reported from Central America on the continuing wars in that region; from Cuba on the nation’s resistance to change; from Ethiopia on the country’s famine and prolonged civil war; from the Middle East during the Gulf War; and from the siege of Sarajevo and the destruction of Kosovo.
Simon has received numerous honors for his reporting. His work was part of the Overseas Press Club and Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards NPR earned for coverage of Sept. 11 and its aftermath. He was part of the NPR news teams that won prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Awards for covering the war in Kosovo as well as the Gulf War. In 1989, he won a George Foster Peabody Award for his weekly radio essays. The award commended him for his sensitivity and literary style in coverage of events including the murder of six Jesuit priests in El Salvador and the San Francisco earthquake. Simon also accepted the Presidential End Hunger Award for his series of reports on the 1987-1988 Ethiopian civil war and drought. He received a 1986 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for his coverage of racism in a South Philadelphia neighborhood, and a 1986 Silver Cindy for a report on conditions at the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s detention center in Harlingen, Texas.
Simon received a Major Armstrong Award in 1979 for his coverage of the American Nazi Party rally in Chicago, and a Unity Award in Media in 1978 for his political reporting on All Things Considered. He also won a 1982 Emmy for the public television documentary The Patterson Project, which examined the effects of President Reagan’s budget cuts on the lives of 12 New Jersey residents.
Simon has been a frequent guest host of the CBS television program Nightwatch and CNBC’s TalkBack Live. In addition to hosting Weekend Edition Saturday, Simon has appeared as an essayist and commentator on NBC’s Weekend Today and NOW with Bill Moyers. He has hosted many public television programs, including “Voices of Vision,” “Life on the Internet,” “State of Mind,” “American Pie,” “Search for Common Ground,” and specials on privacy in America and democracy in the Middle East. He also narrated the documentary film "Lincoln of Illinois" for PBS. Simon participated in the Grammy Award-nominated 50th anniversary remake of The War of the Worlds (co-starring Jason Robards), and hosted public television’s coverage of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Simon has hosted the BBC series Eyewitness, which was seen in the United States on the Discovery Channel, and a BBC special on the White House press corps. Simon was also a featured co-anchor of PBS’s millennium special broadcast in 2000.
Simon has written for The New York Times’ Book Review and Opinion sections, the Wall Street Journal opinion page, The Los Angeles Times, and Gourmet Magazine.
The son of comedian Ernie Simon and actress Patricia Lyons, Simon grew up in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Montreal, Cleveland, and Washington, DC. He attended the University of Chicago and McGill University, and he has received a number of honorary degrees.
Simon’s book Home and Away: Memoir of a Fan was published in the spring of 2000 by Hyperion, a division of Disney. It topped the Los Angeles Times nonfiction bestseller list for several weeks, and was cited as one of the best books of the year in the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and several other publications. His second book, Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball, kicked off the prestigious Wiley Turning Points series in September of 2002. Simon’s first novel, Pretty Birds, about female teenaged snipers in Sarajevo, was released in May 2005 to very strong, positive reviews.
In the summer of 2000, Simon married Caroline Richard. His hobbies are Mexican cooking, ballet, book collecting, and living and dying for the Chicago Cubs (and now the French national soccer team).