Dzevad Karahasan, the great Bosnian storyteller and essayist, rooted in the literary traditions of the ancient, Islamic, and Christian worlds, has an anachronistic view of the craft of writing. The architecture of a novel, its multifaceted temporal structure, and its linguistic polyphony are owed to an aesthetic experience of the city. The contrast between public and private spaces, the encounter, even confrontation with the other, creates tensions that are played out in the narration. Sarajevo exemplifies this poetic insight, a city that— as Karahasan demonstrates in works by Ivo Andric—almost demands a sophisticated, richly layered narrative to do justice to the coexistence of various cultural traditions and religious practices in a single place.