A novel about the radical nature of childhood, the essential role of art, and the end of youth and utopias. 

After a few years spent trying to establish himself as an artist in a bohemian Sarajevo of the late 1980s, teeming with life and experimentation, Nene, a young man in his twenties, overcome by indolence, returns to his small border town to escape the excesses of the capital. Obsessed with the fear that his country will come to an end, he decides to save the memory of his world by transforming it into a work of art. 

His dilemmas intertwine with those of Eliza, an eight-year-old girl with a boundless imagination, who fantasizes about traveling to the other side of the country to meet her unknown father, who is a taboo in the family. She received from him only an enigmatic note, a card with a tiny button at its center that, when pressed, plays the melody of Beethoven's For Elise. 

In his hometown Nene also finds Merima again, his school friend and Eliza’s mother. She is a young woman hurt by love, who carries a heavy secret, but is constantly moved by her passion for socialism and her political commitment to oppose the stormy winds of the time. 

It’s 1990 in Yugoslavia. While the rest of Europe celebrates the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, dangerous ghosts of old hatreds and resentful memories of identity are beginning to reawaken, the resurgence of nationalisms is spreading among people even if there are many new political projects committed against the worst. It’s a time when everything is in motion, everything is still possible, every direction is viable, and the scales can still tip one way or the other. It’s now clear: on one side lies an abyss. Some refuse to see, some cling to hope, many are silently and secretly beginning to change, preparing for something still kept quiet, out of superstition, to avoid reawakening a dormant monster. 

More and more people are asking themselves: Will this country survive? And if the country disappears, what will become of us? Will anyone know what this country was? What was socialism in Yugoslavia? Will there be any relics left, any traces of what we were?

«The same questions that spark Nene’s creativity as he imagines a work of art ideally addressed to a future archaeologist, underlie my desire to recount that historical moment. The idea of a work of art as a relic of a disappearing world is the manifesto of what writing means to me: a way to gather fragments and piece together what has disappeared, be it a country, a language, a society, a family, a love, or a father. 

Nene does with his work of art what I do with my novel. His point of view is that of a young man, my adult alter ego, juxtaposed with the gaze of the little girl Eliza, which was my gaze; I saw those events through the eyes of childhood, radical and imaginative. 

The figure of the passionate Merima allowed me to give voice to those—and there were many, despite the final result—who believed until the very end that war could be avoided and the Yugoslav dream wouldn’t be destroyed. But their trust in the future and in the possibility to influence society with their own choices has been dramatically devitalized. 

I wanted to tell the story of the time before the war began, that is, 1990/91. The war, besides destroying the present and future of a country, also overshadowed what that country had tried to build: the utopia of a plural world that collapsed in the face of resurgent nationalism. All of this, I realize, resonates with our present. It seemed important to me to try to restore the polyphony and nuanced variety of a world that is often hastily dismissed and whose ambiguities and precious singularities are little understood. 

I followed the destinies of ordinary people, drawing inspiration from those I knew or from the many episodes and feelings I managed to reach into the depths of memory. I intertwined these lives with History, as I reconstructed it by consulting the press archives of the time, following the flow of events and trying to understand how people arrived at the end of the world and asking myself if it is possible to understand that the end becomes closer before getting to that point, so to avoid it.» 

Elvira Mujčić

"Elvira Mujčić's monumental achievement: she transformed painful memories and grief into authentic literary works."

Wlodeck Goldkorn, Robinson, la Repubblica

"This novel is both an elegy and an autopsy of a vanished world. Through her storytelling, Elvira Mujčić transforms a specific tragedy into a universal one."

Giulia Basso, Il Piccolo

“There is nothing memorialistic or accusatory: in the world that Mujčić saved, destruction cannot come.”

Mara Gergolet, La Lettura, Corriere della Sera

"Mujčić writes as Dostoevsky would write about his mothers and daughters."

Adriano Sofri, Il Foglio

"The Time Before" on the podcasts by:

Il Post, Timbuctu, Ep. 358 – The war before it began – The Time Before, by Elvira Mujčić, Guanda

Fahrenheit, Book of the day | Elvira Mujčić, The Time Before, Guanda