Panorama/Panorama

The temperament of the children through whose eyes have been seen all the stories mentioned so far is striking similar, and its particular predilections are developed in the story “Panorama”, published in 1958, which contains the least equivocal statement of the positive power of the imagination.

The tale describes a source of great excitement in the childhood of the first-person narrator. For about a year during the boy’s schooldays in Sarajevo there was a permanent “Panorama of the world”: a series of still photographs which could be seen enlarged and brilliantly vivid through a series of special binoculars arranged in a circle. The photographs would be rotated at intervals so that each spectator could look at each one in turn.

For the child the world seen through these binoculars – Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon, Ceylon – became the only reality – “real, glorious, bright life” – and the life of his little Bosnia town seemed “like a bad dream”.

The style of the story conveys its mood of excitement through short sentences and exclamations. The child’s reaction are evoked by his constantly relating what he sees to his own childish experience.

[Introduction][The Journey of Ali Đerzelez][Ćorkan and the German Lady][In the Camp][Love in a Small Town] [Mustafa Magyar][In the Guest-House][The Bridge on the Žepa][The Pasha’s Concubine] [Anika’s Times][Thirst][Death in Sinan’s Tekke][Torso][Letter from 1920] [Mistreatment][The Story of Vizier’s Elephant][The House on Its Own][Zeko][Bar Titanic] [Woman on the Rock][Panorama][A Summer in the South][Jelena, the Woman of My Dream]

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