Dasa Drndic - Böcker

"Belladonna is brutal, beautiful, and unforgettable . . . One of the truly outstanding novels of recent years" EILEEN BATTERSBY, Los Angeles Review of Books** Winner of the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2018**** Shortlisted for the inaugural E.B.R.D. Prize for Literature **** Shortlisted for the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize **An excoriating work of fiction that references the twentieth century's darkest hoursAndreas Ban is a writer and a psychologist, an intellectual proper, but his world has been falling apart for years. When he retires with a miserable pension and finds out that he is ill, he gains a new perspective on the debris of his life and the lives of his friends. In defying illness and old age, Andreas Ban is cynical and powerful, and in his unravelling of his own past and the lives of others, he uncompromisingly lays bare a gamut of taboos.Andreas Ban stands for a true hero of our times; a castaway intellectual of a society which subdues every critical thought under the guise of political correctness. Belladonna addresses some of the twentieth century's worst human atrocities in a powerful fusion of fiction and reality, the hallmark of one of Europe's finest contemporary writers.Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth

*WINNER OF THE BEST TRANSLATED BOOK AWARD USA**SHORTLISTED FOR THE EBRD PRIZE**SHORTLISTED FOR THE OXFORD-WEIDENFELD PRIZE*"A writer and thinker of ever greater relevance, a voice whose wide-ranging screeds we ignore at our peril" CLAIRE MESSUD"Her work is of such power and scope that had she remained alive, she would have been a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature" JOSIP NOVAKOVICH, Los Angeles Review of BooksAn urgent new novel about death, war and memory, and a bristling follow-on from Belladonna.In this extraordinary final work, Daša Drndic's combative, probing voice reaches new heights. In her relentless search for truth she delves into the darkest corners of our lives. And as she chastises, she also atones.Andreas Ban failed in his suicide attempt. Even as his body falters and his lungs constrict, he taps on the glass of history - an impenetrable case filled with silent figures - and tries to summon those imprisoned within. Mercilessly, fearlessly, he continues to dissect society and his environment, shunning all favours as he goes after the evils and hidden secrets of others. History remembers the names of perpetrators, not of the victims.Ban travels from Rijeka to Rovinj in nearby Istria, from Belgrade to Toronto to Tirana, from Parisian avenues to Italian palazzi. Ghosts follow him wherever he goes: chess grandmasters who disappeared during WWII; the lost inhabitants of Latvia; war criminals who found work in the C.I.A. and died peacefully in their beds. Ban's family is with him too: those he has lost and those with one foot in the grave. As if left with only a few pieces in a chess game, Andreas Ban plays a stunning last match against Death.Translated from the Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth

"Trieste is a monumental feat of the imagination. Impassioned and lucid, it is impossible to read it and not come away with a new understanding of the world. Daša Drndic has given us a masterpiece that is not only brilliant, but uncompromisingly humane. How lucky we are" MAAZA MENGISTE, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker Prize"Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary . . . It is a masterpiece" A.N. Wilson, Financial Times"Trieste is a work of European high culture. Drndic is writing neither to entertain (her novel is splendid and absorbing nevertheless) nor to instruct (its subject, the Holocaust, is too intractable to yield lessons). She is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick" Craig Seligman, New York TimesAn old woman sits alone in Gorizia, north-eastern Italy. She is waiting to be reunited with her son. He was fathered by an S.S. officer and stolen from her sixty-two years before by the Nazi authorities during the German occupation. By focusing on the experiences of one individual, Drndic engages head-on with the traumatic history of WWII and the Holocaust and deals unsparingly with the massacre of Jews in Trieste's concentration camp. A literary collage comprising photographs, scraps of poetry, interviews and testimonies from the Nuremberg Trials, it is a formally daring work of immense power and scope.Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursac

Doppelgänger consists of two stories that skillfully revisit the question of “doubles” (famously explored by Stevenson, Dostoyevsky and others), and how an individual is perpetually caught between their own beliefs and those imposed on them by society. ‘Arthur and Isabella’ is a story of the relationship between two elderly people who meet on New Year’s Eve — a romantic encounter which turns into a grotesque portrayal of the loneliness of old age. The second story ‘Pupi’ — a strange mirror of the first — centres on the life of a man who ends up on the streets and associates only with street-sellers the rhinoceroses in the zoo. Together these tales crate the highly original atmosphere that Drndić is famous for in all her works.

All of Drndic’s award-winning work fluctuates between fact and fiction, and 'Dying in Toronto' gives an account of the author’s first year in Canada as a refugee, in 1995. While the book is written in form of essays, it is clearly shaped to tell of that year as a story, and the result is unique in both form and content, combining new techniques of creative personal confession and acute social perception, which offer a rare depth of insight and breadth of perspective on the real, difficult life of an immigrant.Examining the instinct of the good citizen, our narrator considers the confusion of the multinational myth of the ‘Nee World’ through her highly refined, critical intellect. Along the way she creates nothing less than the portrait of a new literary figure – the contemporary intellectual refugee – a point of view at once of its time and acutely contemporary. 'Dying in Toronto' is lucid and tenacious, witty and sad, revealing once again the author’s inability to reconcilable with the status quo, and her committment to fight for justice.

In typical Drndić style, the reader is offered a view of the past and the present through a collage of different genres - from (pseudo) autobiography to documentary material and culinary recipes as the narrative explores different perspectives on the issue of emigration, the unresolved history of the Second World War, while emphasising the absurdity of politics of differences between neighbouring nations. Tea Radan, the narrator of the novel Canzone di Guerra, reflects on her own past and in doing so, composes a forgotten mosaic of historical events that she wants to first tear apart and then reassemble with all the missing fragments. In front of the readers eyes, a collage of different genres takes place - from (pseudo) autobiography to documentary material and culinary recipes. With them, the author Daša Drndić skillfully explores different perspectives on the issue of emigration and the unresolved history of the Second World War, while emphasizing the absurdity of politics of differences between neighboring nations. The narrator subtly weaves the torturous story of searching for her own identity with a relaxed, sometimes disguised ironic style, which takes the reader surprisingly easily into the world of persecution and the sense of alienation between herself and others.