[In the following review, Mitchison lauds The Balkan Express for vividly delineating a war's effects on everyday life.]

Slavenka Drakulic's collection of autobiographical essays about the effect of the Yugoslavian war on everyday life [Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side,] is named after an excruciating train trip the author took from Vienna to Zagreb. She shares a compartment with two Yugoslavs. No one will speak for fear that their accent will disclose their ethnic origin, no one can take a newspaper out of their bag without revealing their allegiance. Even if the travellers did feel chatty, there is nothing to talk about except the war—an impossible, unacceptable subject for conversation between strangers.

So, as the train bumps along, the three passengers sit, knees jostling, looking out the window mutely. Yet, Drakulic observes, the silence which “verges on a scream” is a “good sign, a sign of our unwillingness to accept the war, our desire to distance ourselves and spare each other, if possible.”

From a war that has been so noted for its brutality and horror, this approach may seem unexpectedly mild-mannered, almost drawing-roomish. There are no eyewitness reports of floating corpses in the river, no dens of torture, no barrels of babies' eyes—little of the common currency of war reporting.

Instead, Drakulic chronicles the smaller events which, between April 1991 and May 1992, illustrate the gradual shedding of normal life, the slow slipping into war. She notices that the word “slaughter” now slips off the television anchorman's lips with ease. She sees a gun tucked in the belt of a man at the bus stop. At the grocery store she hears a woman order: 16 kilos of oil, 20 kilos of flour, 20 kilos of sugar, 10 of salt.

Real life is always slightly at a slant for our expectations. When Drakulic opens a magazine and sees a photograph of a couple lying dead on the ground she finds she is fascinated, above all, by the crumpled, yellow packet of yeast by the woman's head. When the first bomb falls near Drakulic's flat in Zagreb, she freezes in her seat, and, overcome with a sense of heaviness, wonders why on earth she has just redecorated the bedroom with Laura Ashley wallpaper.

Just as in Anne Frank's Diary, despite the Holocaust, the teenager is obsessed with family squabbles and homework, Drakulic's attention to seemingly mundane matters accounts for the writing's verisimilitude. But there is also a self-conscious message: “Look, I'm one of you. I have an unexceptional urban, middle-class life—children, newspapers, visits to the cinema, shopping trips, television programmes. Now watch as I become something else … Let me show you the changes as the dark pressures of war take over.”

Drakulic writes: “The war devours us from the inside, eating away like acid … it wrecks our lives … it spawns evil within us … we tear the living flesh of those friends who do not feel the same as we do …” Some of the most moving essays are Drakulic's attempts to explain astonishing acts of treachery: the nice, homeless young journalist who feels justified in informing on a friend in order to be given her apartment; the famous actress who defends the political autonomy of art and finds herself the focus of a hate campaign and is shunned by all her friends.

These cases are reported with the sympathy and understanding of someone who recognises her own complicity, her own tendency to humbug, and who explains how she too is implicated in these acts. In a heartrending letter to her daughter, Drakulic also acknowledges the responsibility of all her generation who saw what was happening in Yugoslavia, and simply buried themselves in their smaller, private concerns until it was too late.

The experience of civil war has been likened to having sex for the first time, or taking drugs. The individual, questioning his or her identity and worth, will never be quite the same again. For the hypersensitive, the entire world seems undermined. Emotions are heightened, skin is thinner, every drip of the bathroom tap or rumble of the central heating can suddenly become unbearably loud.

Inevitably, war also undermines our trust in the power of language, and the writer trying to convey this heightened internal reality must call on enormous powers both of expression and of restraint. That Drakulic accomplishes this balance—her “ice over a treacherous river”—is probably the greatest achievement in this wise, profound and original book.