THE DEVIL IS A BLACK DOG

Nineteen interconnected short stories about the toll of war, written by someone who was there.

The old joke says that if fairy tales begin, “Once upon a time,” then war stories always start with, “You ain’t gonna believe this….” Translated from the Hungarian, journalist Jászberényi's stories about war correspondents, combatants and victims ring as true as any nonfiction. In the opener, “The Fever,” we meet the author’s main channel to readers, a jaded war reporter named Daniel Marosh, who's suffering from his illness in a Sudanese backwater on his way to yet another conflict zone. “I am smiling because I don’t regret anything, really,” he tells us. “I never wanted to live a sensible life. I never wanted to be a model citizen, have a family, or even a child. If something like that happened, it would end in total failure. I only have answers when the circumstances are clear, like life and death; that’s when I feel best, when the questions are easy, uncomplicated by the reflexes of a dying civilization.” This is heady, dizzying writing, rapt with cleareyed descriptions of armed children, brutal executions, sniper fire and sandstorms. Whether set in Sudan, Egypt or Gaza, each story reveals something about the nature of war and finds a kind of clinical sympathy not only for those caught up in it, but also for those who wage it. The best stories, like “Something About the Job,” delve into the psyche of the book’s determined journalist, explaining to us why he is the way he is and questioning whether the war made him or he sought out the scene. Despite the book’s very spare language, Jászberényi finds a kind of poetry in these wars, even as he declines to turn a blind eye to the suffering they bring. These stories sound more like Philip Caputo or Tim O’Brien than a postmodern accounting of current events.

A master class in how to tell a war story.