... a wry, inventive and ultimately devastating attempt to recover a personal history that war has put forever out of reach ... Rather than trying to weave these stories into a coherent account, Stanisic jumbles genres to reflect how compromised memory is. Where You Come From has its share of quirky, half-true anecdotes of the kind one expects from a memoir ... But Stanisic’s lightness only makes tragedy more devastating when it comes ... Damion Searls’s translation does justice to Stanisic’s dry wit and linguistic playfulness, and captures the tense undercurrents building throughout the book. Though shot through with trauma, Where You Come From is also funny and moving ... Ordinary and accidental, this is the quiet beauty of immigrant life.

Weaving autofiction, myth-making, and yes, even a little bit of choose-your-own-adventure, Stanišić paints a beautiful and fragmented picture of what it means to belong when your home and language have been lost to you ... Stanišić is able to write with such aching beauty, to convey such rare intimacy in his lines. ... not stuck in the past; this trauma’s roots run deep, and couldn’t be contained there ... It may seem odd, closing a book with such trauma on a section as playful and experimental as this, and yet it feels completely fitting. Much of Where You Come From deals with Stanišić recalling and remaking the myth of the Stanišić family, and his life, and so it seems completely fitting to carry it beyond the present, all the threads spread in front of you, waiting to grasp at whichever strikes your fancy ... a deeply beautiful book, painfully so at times, on the ties that bind us: home, family, story, language. He recounts triumphs and loss, myths made, myths forgotten, and myths in the making. More than one section made me tear up, and even more made me chuckle. It’s a rich tapestry whose embrace shows us a little more about the world, and a little more about ourselves.

Stanisic’s fragmented style effectively mirrors the book’s subject matter. Knowledge is gained piecemeal, drip-fed through Stanisic’s kaleidoscopic prose. He recounts anecdotes, memories and biographical details in simple, matter-of-fact sentences. Sometimes he resorts to lists, WhatsApp conversations, passing observations in the way that memory, too, unfolds in disconnected images and incomplete narratives. Stanisic is a versatile writer and moments of acerbic wit—which recall the razor-sharp commentary of fellow Yugoslav-born author Dubravka Ugresic—are interspersed with poignant descriptions of unbelonging in Germany ... A final act of multiple endings affirms that our lives can never be neatly packaged: reality’s edges are too frayed. A more structurally straightforward finale might have offered something more; the book already does enough to imply that futures are slippery and contingent, more influenced by immigration officers than personal agency. Where Stanisic succeeds is in inviting us to honour and acknowledge what Roland Barthes called the 'what has been', the uncanny evidence of our past; there, we might be able to save our stories from being swept away by the current.

... [an] often brilliant novel ... honed and considered, more in control of its material [than Stanišić’s previous book]. It is, at least at first, almost straightforward ... wonderfully alive, vital in its depiction of family life ... It is a refractive prism, this deep delve into the past, so often leading to altered or misleading truths from established facts ... The fallibility of memory is a well-worn trope, but Stanišić’s understanding of how memory can affect the contours of the present is consistently surprising. For all the hatred that stirred the Bosnian war, the overwhelming, sometimes overheated, sense in Where You Come From is love ... The book’s conclusion, though, is a bravura, sustained and singular piece of writing that bursts with wit, heart and empathy. Tricksy as an extended Choose Your Own Adventure section might appear, it brings the novel together as a totality, delivering multiple endings, all of which land deftly in Damion Searls’s excellent translation.

... a playful, formally adventurous novel that freely blends truth and fiction in its meditation on homelands ... The line between novel and memoir is frequently blurred, with the novel mimicking his grandmother's surreal existence as her dementia progresses and the past increasingly intrudes on the present. In perhaps the novel's most enjoyable—and melancholy—surprise, it includes a branching choose-your-own-adventure with a variety of endings and fantastical digressions ... the author's earnestness [is] both undercut and reinforced by humor ... The novel is determined to surprise and unmoor readers, perhaps in the same way the author/protagonist found the course of his own life surprising and disconcerting, with the author's restless imagination a constant, delightful companion.

Where You Come From has arguably been overpraised in Germany, where it won a major national book prize, but it’s understandable that a rattled liberal establishment would want to celebrate its implied politics of tolerance, post-nationalism and integration. At times, Stanišić’s tone resembles a Der Spiegel editorial ... Stanišić enjoys including lists, lyrics, transcripts and assorted documentary titbits as he muses on the experiences of exile and assimilation, shame and family. A mild, fairly likable narrator, Saša is most engaging when discussing either his efforts to adjust to German life or his earlier, youthful adventures as the fog of war came rolling towards his homeland. Parts of the book read like a family photo album, interesting or not depending on how curious we are about another person’s grandparents, uncles, cousins ... The book’s final third is its weakest ... the novel morphs into a Choose Your Own Adventure story ... it’s a nice idea, but its emotional core—the death of a man’s grandmother—is not enough to carry the formal whimsy, and so it becomes a slightly irritating frippery. Where You Come From is most rewarding when it cleaves closest to straightforward memoir: a story about place and displacement, where you begin and where you end up, and how much—and in what way—this matters.

Stanišić has a deft hand at both the tragic and the comic ... The novel ends with a Choose Your Own Adventure–style narrative that’s rendered perfectly and heartbreakingly; it’s affecting but not manipulative. Stanišić's book, ably translated by Searls, is full of tenderness and compassion and also a real intelligence—it’s a stunning novel that asks what it really means to be from somewhere, anywhere ... Tender, intelligent, and brilliant.

In this sardonic if uneven novel, Stanišić...composes a digressive shape-shifting self-portrait with some mesmerizing elements ... The wry accounts about his ancestors are highlights, though the novel sags in a long middle section about Saša’s teenage years in Heidelberg, and a choose-your-own-adventure–style conclusion feels a bit gimmicky. Still, the writing often surprises, and the narrator displays a winning ludic spirit in the face of tragedy and dislocation. Though a bit too precious at times, at its best this taps into the mythic energies of the author’s homeland.