“The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, & Return” Book Review

In the book The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return, special attention is paid to the issues like war, violence, and destruction faced by the main character Kenan Trebincevic. He is represented as a literary round-dynamic character, who grows, becomes mature, and evolves throughout the course of the story. The events 1992 and 1995 had a negative impact on the main character because the war, which savaged Yugoslavia, led to the growth of violence and destruction. Families were torn apart, villages were eliminated, and innocent children suffered. According to the findings provided by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, about 104,732 people were killed during that military conflict. Thousands of people had to leave their country in order to survive. Some of them eventually came back to their native cities, while others did not return. Trebincevic was one of those people who was forced to flee at the age of 11 years old. Thesis statement: The life of Kenan Trebincevic altered forever when he left his country during the war, but he underwent a significant inner change, including his personality transformation and change in attitudes, which led to forgiveness. 

In fact, Trebincevic is a round-dynamic character as he completes his Bosnia List and confronts his past with optimism. He recognizes the need for fostering racial equality across the world to make all people happy. The narrator writes in his memoir, “Where we lived was the most religiously mixed: 32 percent Christian Serbs; 17 percent Croats, who practised Roman Catholicism; and 45 percent Muslim, like us” (Trebincevic 26). Trebincevic was Muslim, and his  secular family followed the established traditions as they “had Ramadan and no Santa Claus” (Trebincevic 26). The main characters inner transformation was based on his previous life experiences which affected his personality formation.

Also, in this book, Trebincevic shares his personal experiences with the journalist Susan Shapiro, which allow to see the horrors of the war through the eyes of a child. The main character was a witness of the war actions, which ruined his inner world, but he recognized that what he felt was normal. He writes, “Now that I was here, it was impossible to pretend everything was fine and back to normal” (Trebincevic 110). The main character demonstrates his dynamism and optimism, although his inner feelings are suppressed. He writes, “My former haunts were tainted, the scene of crimes against me — and humanity. . . The continued, collective denial was suffocating. I’d returned a strong thirty-year-old man shielded by my list of vengeance. Yet part of me was still a shocked twelve-year-old boy who wanted to scream, ‘But how could you do that to us?’” (Trebincevic 110).

In the interview, Trebincevic gives a clear explanation of his personality change which was shaped by the external factors like new country, new people, and new culture. He says, “I didn’t forgive the murderers who killed my people. I forgave my parents for not getting us out of there earlier. If we left when the war began, I probably would not have ended up in America. But I think, more than anything, I forgave myself for accepting that I have a better life now than I would’ve had I stayed in Bosnia” (Chahinian 1).

Thus, it is necessary to conclude that Kenan Trebincevic, the narrator and main character of the book The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return, is a round-dynamic character, who underwent a significant inner change, namely transformation of his personality and his attitudes, which eventually led to forgiveness. Although Trebincevic was a witness of the horrors of war, such as starvation and desperate living conditions, he managed to handle the feeling of hatred, remained resilient, and maintained his dignity.

Works Cited

Chahinian, Haig. “The Bosnia List: An Interview with Kenan Trebincevic.” Los Angeles Review of Books. April 20, 2014. Available at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bosnia-list-interview-kenan-trebincevic/#!>

Trebincevic, Kenan & Shapiro, Susan. The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return. Penguin Books, 2014. Print.

The terms offer and acceptance. (2016, May 17). Retrieved from

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"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016.

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freeessays.club (2016) The terms offer and acceptance [Online].
Available at:

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"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]

"The terms offer and acceptance." freeessays.club, 17 May 2016

[Accessed: March 29, 2024]
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