Book Review: Illegitimate by Adnan Mahmutovic

Illegitimate
by Adnan Mahmutovic
Cantarabooks April 2009

Reviewed by Kathryn Magendie

A woman’s bones go out of joint in labor, my Mom used to say. On New Year’s Eve 2000, in Munich, a Polish girl, Bozena, is coming apart in her basement. Down here, in this cold concrete box in Dachau, the sounds from the street life and the festivities are weak. The happy screams and cracking fireworks, drunken voices and barking of German shepherds come to my ears as if through water. […] I straddle Bozena’s left leg and slowly press her stomach. […] I slap her across the mouth but she will not stop screaming. […] I hit the concrete to unhinge my fingers and try to shove the ball into Bozena’s mouth. It’s too big, but I press it harder and her nostrils widen like eyes in the dark…

The opening scene to Adnan Mahmutovic’s novella Illegitimate, while vividly written, is unforgiving of the main character, Fatima. As the scene progresses, one may be repelled by Fatima’s harshness and lack of tenderness toward the suffering Bozena. Keep reading, Readers. Follow Fatima’s story and discover pockets of hope and a charming toughness of character that endears. One is reminded of those plucky Hollywood starlets with a “tomorrow is another day” attitude that endures even the most heinous of human indignities.

In Fatima, Mahmutovic has created the story of a young woman who could easily have slipped into cliché—the prostitute with a heart of gold who strives to make a better life (she wants to be a journalist) out of her hard-scrabble past (she is a Bosnian refugee who lost family, home, and first love to war). However, in his telling of Fatima’s story, Mahmutovic instead fashions a world of unique language, character, sense of humor, place, setting, and tone that allow the work to rise above a mere story of a girl, a dream, and “the oldest profession in the world.” After disappointment clobbers Fatima once again, she quips with a shrug, “So much for Scheherazade or Pretty Woman.” Indeed!

There are colorful secondary characters who are finely crafted. Fatima’s prostitute friends, who slip in and out of Fatima’s life; Max, a patron lover, who will give Fatima a gift that will offer a hope she can never have imagined; Friedrich, who fans Fatima’s hopes to fall out of her profession and into a writing career, and who will ultimately betray her; Heidi, who wants to give prostitution a business-legitimacy and enlists Fatima’s help; and the city of Munich itself with its smells and sounds and cold fingers of air curling against Fatima as she walks its streets, her head swirling with possibility. Mahmutovic writes well from a woman’s point of view, neither seeping in stereotype, nor over-sentimentalizing his female characters.

In between Fatima’s manipulation of men and events in order to survive, there are the cold realities of her profession, and Mahmutovic does not spare us in his depiction of cruel misery. Yet, smart writing, intelligent wit, and a delicious sense of the absurdities of life give Illegitimate a playful edge to what could have been a story heavy with gloom and despair. There is a hopeful optimism that follows Fatima as she strides from memory to optimism to woe and back again.

From its harsh beginnings, Mahmutovic leads readers through a kaleidoscope of human foibles and finally to an ending sanguinely beautiful, and completely satisfying.



Adnan Mahmutovic was born in 1974 in Banja Luka, in northern Bosnia. As a teenager he arrived in Sweden on a refugee bus, then for a year lived in three provisional refugee facilities. Afterward, he moved to a regular neighborhood and started school all over again. In 1997, he relocated to Stockholm to work as a personal special-needs assistant; this employment financed his further studies in English literature and philosophy. In spring 2004, he studied creative writing and received a scholarship for graduate studies in English literature at Stockholm University. He is currently studying for his PhD. His first book, [Refug]e, a collection of short stories and poetry, was published in May 2005 by Konstfack University College of Arts Crafts and Design. Additionally, he has also staged Michael Frayn’s politically charged drama, Copenhagen. Adnan is a proud member of PEN, the international organization that fights for the rights of exiled writers.


Kathryn Magendie is Co-Managing Editor of The Rose & Thorn, and author of the novel TENDER GRACES.