*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 Books
An 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
*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 Books
An 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
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Reviews
Reading Daša Drndic is not for the fainthearted. Anger radiates from Drndic's pages, and perhaps the book's greatest strength is the way in which it gives a voice to those people who are unable to tell their own stories.
Drndic has in her own way composed an astonishment that extracts light from darkness
The formidable Daša Drndic has created something like a modern-day Homeric narrative of wars that are anything but glorious. In Celia Hawkesworth, she has a translator of genius who shares her vision. It is difficult to suggest a contemporary English-language novel with which to compare it, or one that might even approach its eloquence and daring.
One of the handful of truly great artists of our beleaguered epoch, her historically-based, semi-autobiographical fictions are as exhilarating as they are disturbing; dense, profound and extraordinarily readable
Funny, angry, informed and intent on the truth, no voice is quite as blisteringly beautiful as that of Daša Drndic . . . a major literary artist, a truthteller and custodian of the collective memory of forgotten European Jews
There is great wisdom, along with dark history, in these pages, for those ready to take on the challenge... E.E.G. reveals Drndic as a writer and thinker of ever greater relevance, a voice whose wide-ranging screeds we ignore at our peril.
Her incisive skill and radical style render potentially grim reading compulsive. She was a voice of - and for - our times
Drndic will be remembered for her outspokenness, her refusal to be quiet, her interrogation of history, and her exploration of difficult or taboo topics
This is a novel of ideas but also of exquisite poetry . . . An elegant search for lost time and a fitting valediction by a superb writer.
E.E.G. is a monument against the common notion that political convictions soften with age, as you learn to let the world off the hook. Neither Drndic nor her books did any such thing.
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