State of Siege

by Helen Lane (Translator), Juan Goytisolo (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2003

  $3.45

  A writer looks out from his hotel room in Sarajevo at a city under siege. He watches a woman struggling to avoid the snipers as she makes her way home. Suddenly a mortar explodes nearby and he is killed. But by the time the Spanish military investigator arrives, the corpse has disappeared, leaving only a few personal effects and a notebook of stories and poems, marked with the initials, J.G. As the investigator continues his search for the man's identity, he begins to read the stories, of dreams of a rebellion of a city's underclass, of a district of Paris under siege that is ignored by the rest of the city. As he paints a compelling picture of a city laid waste by the barbarism of war, another picture begins to emerge, of a society so callous it is capable of standing by and watching its citizens be destroyed.