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Vanja Bulic. Tunel: Lepa sela lepo gore. 2d ed. Belgrade. BIGZ. 1996. 191 pages. ISBN 86-13-00880-1.
Vanja Bulic's 1995 novel Tunel (The Tunnel) in
spired both an Oscar-nominated film (Beautiful Villages Beautifully Burn) and a successful television series. A news item about an actual event gave the author the idea for his novel, which in its second edition carries the movie title as a subtitle. The background is the Bosnian War, which has divided nations, relatives, friends, and neighbors into two belligerent camps according to religion, pitting Muslim against Orthodox.
Six Serbian fighters are cut off from their division and find refuge in a road tunnel, expecting their brothers in arms to find them. They are soon discovered by the Muslims, however, and so are trapped. The six hail from various parts of Serbia and have widely varying educational and professional backgrounds; only one of them, the main protagonist of the book, Milan, is native to the nearby village, a multinational community where Muslims and Serbs have long been living in close proximity. Milan's best friend from childhood, with whom he shared many adolescent adventures and school...