Before The Feast by Saša Stanišić, trans. Anthea Bell, book review

In his fictional portrait of a small town in eastern Germany, Stanišić widens the lens but lowers the pressure

"Who writes the old stories? Who takes that job on?" In one of the swift dives into the past that punctuate this fictional portrait of a small town in eastern Germany, a girl named Anna stands on the walls with a crossbow to defend her home against the "marauding Soldiery" of the Thirty Years War. Fantasy, folklore, or history: who gets to decide? Back in the present, another young Anna manages to disarm a depressed retired soldier who harbours suicidal, or maybe murderous, thoughts. And so the little backwater of Fürstenfelde banks another tale in the treasury of stories that braid its people together.

This is the second novel by Saša Stanišić, born in Bosnia in 1978 and a teenage refugee from the civil war in former Yugoslavia. That rending conflict wired his debut – How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone – with a crackling tragi-comic current of rage and sorrow, nostalgia and grief. Here, in his first book set entirely in his new homeland, he widens the lens but lowers the pressure. For sure, Fürstenfelde – drab, provincial, never more than a minor footnote to history – has seen armies march and ideologies shift on its sandy soil between two legend-haunted lakes. Overall, "we've had more victims to mourn than heroes to celebrate". But today, on the eve of the town's September feast and more than two decades into the post-1990 era of peace, freedom and tranquillity, the townsfolk have blessings to count as well as losses to mourn.

The action, which embraces a clutch of linked stories, unfolds over the night before the festival. Switching among styles with a dancing virtuosity, Stanišić knits a dozen characters into a multi-stranded tissue of gossip, myth and memory. From the teenage bell-ringer to his archivist mother, the garage-owner to the just-deceased ferryman, the novel layers tales from past and present into a late-summer night's dream. Stanišić time-travels with aplomb and even makes space for an animal perspective: a stalking vixen who watches "humans do what humans most like doing: they make one thing into other things". Above all, like the painter Frau Kranz, he has "found the right colour for everything that grows, stands or dies here".

In English, Stanišić makes a dream team with Anthea Bell, who translates with a pitch-perfect ear for every twist and frisk of his German. She even follows his rhyme-scheme when we meet a mysterious hip-hop duo of travellers. Although the novel's recursive, portmanteau form may lack urgency, its sheer versatility of voice and multiplicity of viewpoint mean that this vigil never drags. As an ensemble piece, with its true hero a place, Before the Feast may remind British readers of Graham Swift's Waterland or Adam Thorpe's Ulverton. In Germany, the history-sodden landscapes of Günter Grass might spring to mind. If the novel misses the passion and elegy of Stanišić's debut, then this child of war and exile knows that a quiet town in a quiet time has a magic of its own.

Pushkin Press, £14.99. Order at £13.49 inc. p&p from the Independent Bookshop