Staff Picks: Color, Crags, and Croatia
Daša Drndić. Photo: Mavric Pivk.
Daša Drndić’s is a sequel of sorts to her novel , also translated by Celia Hawkesworth and also published by New Directions. Like , is narrated by the retired psychologist and academic Andreas Ban, and its plot consists mainly of Ban sifting through documents, photographs, ephemera, and memories related to Croatian complicity with Nazism and the Yugoslav ethnic conflicts of the nineties. A traditional plot, though, isn’t necessarily what’s important to this story; truth is. “Autobiographical books don’t exist,” Ban observes near the novel’s beginning, “autobiographies don’t exist, there are multigraphies, biographical mixes, biographical cocktails, the whole of a life through which we dig, which we clear out, from which we select fragments, remnants, little frequently stretches the definition of the novel to devastating effect, akin to Thomas Bernhard or Elfriede Jelinek, two writers Drndić has cited as influences. “Art should shock, hurt, offend, intrigue,” she told Dustin Illingworth in a 2017 featured on , “be a merciless critic of the merciless times we are not only witnessing but whose victims we have become.” Sadly, Drndić passed away last June at the age of seventy-two, but her books—concerned as they are with the crimes of the twentieth century—offer a blueprint as to what the novel in the twenty-first century could look like.
