Drndic's writing is superb and deals with themes of history, illness, academia and all without flinching. Sebald.įerocious.an unforgettable blend of fact and fiction, history and the present. A novel in the documentary style of the German writer W. We might call the novel experimental because of some of the techniques the writer employs. “Souvenirs can’t help here.” And they don't. “The past is riddled with holes,” she writes. He tries to push the past away, 'to land on a little island of time in which tomorrow does not exist, in which yesterday is buried.” Drndic´ leafs through the horrors of history with a cold unflinching wit. Ban’s memories of Belgrade (which he thought he had left behind) and of Amsterdam (a different world and life) alternate with meditations on hole-ridden time (ebbing away through its perforations), on his measly pension, on growing old and fragile, on the intelligence of rats and the agelessness of lobsters, on deadly nightshade. He sifts through the remnants of his life-his research, books, medical records, photographs-remembering old lovers and friends, the tragedies of WWII, the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Winner of 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translationįrom the author of the highly acclaimed Trieste, a fierce novel about history, memory, and illnessĪndreas Ban, a psychologist who no longer psychologizes, a writer who no longer writes, lives alone in a coastal town in Croatia.

Daša drndić belladonna