Out of the Woods by Gretchen Shirm review – a compelling reflection on bearing witness

The Guardian

21-04-2025

Out of the Woods, the fourth novel of Gretchen Shirm, is a sobering reflection on the necessity of bearing witness. It is also inseparable from real events: the massacre in 1995 of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys by the Serbian Army of Republika Srpska in Srebrenica, and the later conviction of a senior military commander, Radislav Krstić, for genocide. The novel, though imperfect, elevates the lived experience of survivors with care and verisimilitude, while asking probing questions about how to comprehend their trauma.
Jess, an introverted Australian woman in her 50s, has moved to the Netherlands to work as a legal secretary at The Hague. It's the year 2000, and a United Nations tribunal is prosecuting war crimes committed in former Yugoslavia, with Jess's days filled with transcribing the testimony of survivors of the Bosnian war. As the trial unfolds, two divergent feelings increasingly disorient her: the yawning gulf between the atrocities and her written account; and her sympathy for one of the defendants, a military commander named K.
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Beyond the walls of The Hague, Jess navigates new relationships and old demons. 'She had always struggled, that was who she was,' she reflects, and we come to know her hardships: a childhood spent in poverty; the abuse and neglect of a mentally unstable mother; a divorce following her husband's adultery. We also learn about the challenges she has faced as a parent; that she worries her love for her son, Daniel, is too overbearing, and that somewhere deep within her, she is, in fact, cruel. She bears psychic scars; some are still healing.
These passages focused on Jess are tended to with nuance and care, though they are occasionally repetitive and overlong (the novel as a whole needs a tighter edit). In contrast, the sections focused on the judicial process cut through, rendered with authenticity and depth. Shirm formerly worked as a legal intern at the UN tribunal for former Yugoslavia, and the breadth of her research, attention to detail and familiarity with this world are tangible. The weaving in of real witness testimony, in the vein of Svetlana Alexievich, is delicately resonant.
Shirm also navigates moral complexities around culpability, as Jess struggles with the sympathy she feels towards the military officer K. She questions the guilt of a single man, a link in a command chain. But as the personal turmoils Jess is projecting on K become clearer, the novel becomes more interested in what our preoccupation with moral binaries reveals about ourselves. As Merjem, a Bosnian woman, asks, is there a meaningful difference between 'an evil man and someone who was involved in circumstances beyond their control and, because of that, did evil things'? The novel never offers a definitive answer.
Elsewhere, Out of the Woods offers compelling observations on the human need to articulate ourselves and the inadequacy of language for the task. The unknowable nature of the suffering experienced by genocide survivors is powerfully evoked, with the words of their testimony failing to cohere, to cling to an understandable reality. For Jess, who initially takes comfort in the 'compact, contained' nature of her transcription, a garish dissonance begins to resonate, exacerbated by the lag time in the court's English translation:
… she was writing these words down but none of them seemed to make sense and she wondered whether something was wrong, whether the translation was off. She waited for someone to tell the witness to stop, to say that an error had been made.
Something as colossal as genocide, the lived experience in a sentence such as 'I couldn't utter a single word to my child as she was being taken away', resists description and comprehension. But for Jess, the act of bearing witness – including visiting the places where the atrocities took place – helps aid her understanding; helps her find 'the places to slot these words away inside her'. The words become a part of Jess: 'now in her dreams, they played out as stories, laid out in her mind'.
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The epigraph for Out of the Woods includes a quote featured in Bosnian writer Semezdin Mehmedinovic's 1960 work Sarajevo Blues: 'There are neither major nor minor tragedies. Tragedies exist. Some can be described, there are others for which every heart is too small.' Shirm draws faint lines between these minor and major experiences, incomparable yet nonetheless lived traumas. Neither are flattened in doing so, with Shirm instead articulating how, when faced with the incomprehensible, our own experiences can be a prism through which we may glimpse understanding.
Out of the Woods by Gretchen Shirm is out through Transit Lounge ($34.99)