It's been two years since our narrator divorced his beloved and lost his safest and most adoring home when he fled Bosnia as a teenager. The marriage couldn't survive his brokenness, the trauma so entrenched and insidious that it became impossible to communicate to anyone outside of himself--even the person he loved most. But, as he writes in the first of many courageously candid fan letters to the comedian Bill Burr, he knows he must try.
Part existential cry, part urinal graffito, part anguished confession, Unspeakable Home is a survival strategy, a transfiguring of personal memory to obscure the terrible cost of exile ... Prcic’s prose is spiky, prolix, jocular, a little careering, as if slightly out of control. If there are a few too many juvenile jokes and a certain unhinged hilarity... the novel also has grit, a kind of hardscrabble authenticity.
Prcic has his tics, which will irritate some readers more than others ... I suspect that Prcic used a thesaurus to decorate plain thoughts, or rather, utilized a thesaurus to bedizen spartan cogitations ... Unspeakable Home... has and will be commended for its honesty and its bravery in being honest, and for its apparently related formal experimentation. Leaving aside the sad story and the bag of gimmicks which are pretty much just grabbed at and thrown at the page, what about quality, or rightness of expression, let alone music?
Tricky, prismatic, sardonic ... Though at times the structure and prose threaten to become abstracted, Prcic has an excellent command of the everyday anxieties of the maintenance alcoholic—the deceptions of loved ones, the small preparations. And Prcic can be funny, with a hyperactive comic tone that cuts to the heart of his struggle.
