I know it's a little late...

but I was looking over my blogs and realized that I had saved Word documents that I never put on here... so anyway. 

In Aleksandar Hemon's "A Coin," he describes a woman looking back on her experiences living in war-torn Yugoslavia. I was most interested in this short story because my family is from both Serbia AND Croatia, and we still have a lot of family living there, so I guess I felt like I had a small connection to this story.

The confusing part about this story was the flip-flopping between time. One minute the narrator was dodging bullets in Bosnia, and the next minute writing letters from America. I also had a hard time with some of the descriptions. The parts about the dogs eating people and snipers killing dogs just for fun made me a little sad-face. 

Another part I had trouble with was that the speaker turned out to be a woman. For the first I don't know how long reading this, I thought that the narrator was a gay man trapped somewhere with his morbid-cameraman lover. Once I found out the speaker was a woman, I felt like it made a little more sense, but based on the fact that the author is a man, I assumed that the narrator would, too, be a man (I guess you know what they say about assuming...). 

Knowing that the speaker was truly meant to be a woman, I have a hard time believing some of the descriptions, and looking back I can see why I thought it was a man (aside from the author being male). From a female prospective, I just feel like the morbid details of the suffering and warfare would be ignored and that a female would focus more on the actual people around her. The relationships she has (in more depth) and the people around her and how they are reacting to the situation. Not just that they had to run from snipers, had no food, blah blah blah. 

I guess that's just me. 

Overall, once I finally realized that the author was flashing back and forth and that the speaker was truly a woman, I enjoyed reading this short story... I think.