Picked this Dutch literary thriller up as it won an award recently. A quick read, done in a few hours. The structure is shoving the scaffolding of the design in your face too much and keeps you acutely aware you are walking around in a deliberate construct rather than in France on the Camino between Le Puy and Conques. The supposedly thriller elements I felt were somewhat clumsy as they neither thrill the protagonist nor the reader, and you see the final reveal (of who B. must be) coming very quickly.

Yet ultimately it does not matter.

Not to the very real subject matter of the traumas of the Balkan wars.
The first hand stories I heard of confusing realities spinning out of control into bloodshed and what it does to you, and my work in the region that continuously showed its traces, the still ringing nationalistic tunes, they all fit with what Niewierra worked into her story.

Not to the questions she raises about what shapes identity, who you ‘really’ are.
Shaped by context and the propagation of older collective trauma and getting subsumed in the momentum when it breaks to the surface, or shaped by what resides in you, things brought forth by small kind encounters, or nipped through other unkind ones. The way identity can get pulled into different directions simultaneously metaphorically and geographically, like I encountered working in Serbia.

In that it reminds me of The Scent of Rain in the Balkans, by Gordana Kuić. She published her debut bestseller in Serbian in 1986, right when Serbian nationalism became dominant and the path towards the Balkan wars of the early nineties was becoming set.

Ultimately we all walk our own individual camino, if not the one to Compostela. A path that always must include the past, and those we walked it with, but a past that should not determine the choice of current traveling companions, where to linger for a while or when to move on, nor preclude a change of direction in the now.