“Splendid and absorbing . . . [Drndic] is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick . . . These dense and satisfying pages capture the crowdedness of memory.” — New York Times Book Review Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmler’s clandestine Lebensborn project. Haya reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family’s experiences, in a narrative that deals unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps, and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, and to eyewitness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. From this broad collage of material and memory arises the staggering chronicle of Nazi occupation in northern Italy. “Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary . . . It is a masterpiece.” — A. N. Wilson, Financial Times “A book of events that have made the last century infamous for the ages, a book that, if it moves you as it moved me, you will have to set down now and then, to breathe." — Alan Cheuse, NPR

Trieste

Literature & Fiction

Drndic, Daša

United States

HarperVia

Winner of 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation
From the author of the highly acclaimed Trieste, a fierce novel about history, memory, and illness Andreas Ban, a psychologist who no longer psychologizes, a writer who no longer writes, lives alone in a coastal town in Croatia. His body is failing him. 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. 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 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. “The past is riddled with holes,” she writes. “Souvenirs can’t help here.” And they don't.

Belladonna

Literary

New Directions

Financial Times Book of the Year
An urgent new novel about death, war, and memory from the highly acclaimed Croatian writer
In this breathtaking final work, Daša Drndic reaches new heights. Andreas Ban’s suicide attempt has failed. Though very ill, he still finds the will to tap on the glass of history to summon those imprisoned within. Mercilessly, he dissects society and his environment, shunning all favors as he goes after the evils and hidden secrets of our times. History remembers the names of the perpetrators, not the victims―Ban remembers and honors the lost. He travels from Rijeka to Zagreb, from Belgrade to Tirana, from Parisian avenues to Italian castles. Ghosts follow him wherever he goes: chess grandmasters who disappeared during WWII; the lost inhabitants of Latvia; war criminals who found work in the CIA and died peacefully in their beds. Ban’s family is with him too, those already dead and those with one foot in the grave. As if left with only a few pieces in a chess game, Andreas Ban―and Daša Drndic―play a stunning last match against Death.

EEG: A Novel

Longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019, a swift, biting novel from the late Croatian master, Dasa Drndic 
Two elderly people, Artur and Isabella, meet and have a passionate sexual encounter on New Year’s Eve. Details of the lives of Artur, a retired Yugoslav army captain, and Isabella, a Holocaust survivor, are revealed through police dossiers. As they fight loneliness and aging, they take comfort in small things: for Artur, a collection of 274 hats; for Isabella, a family of garden gnomes who live in her apartment. Later, we meet the ill-fated Pupi, who dreamed of becoming a sculptor but instead became a chemist and then a spy. As Eileen Battersby wrote, “As he stands, in the zoo, gazing at a pair of rhinos, in a city most likely present-day Belgrade, this battered Everyman feels very alone: ‘I would like to tell someone, anyone, I’d like to tell someone: I buried Mother today.’” Pupi sets out to correct his family’s crimes by returning silverware to its original Jewish owners through the help of an unlikely friend, a pawnbroker.
Described by Dasa Drndic as “my ugly little book,” Doppelgänger was her personal favorite.

Doppelgänger

In the 1990s, the unnamed narrator of Battle Songs&nbsp;leaves Yugoslavia with her daughter Sara to Toronto to start a new life. They, along with other refugees, encounter a new country but not a new home. Book editors sell hotdogs, mathematicians struggle to get by on social security, violinists hawk cheap goods on the street. Years after arriving in Canada, when she thinks no one can hear her, Sara still sings in the shower: What can we do to make things better, what can we do to make things better, la-la-la-la. In true Drndic style, the novel has no one time or place. It is interspersed with stories from the Yugoslav Wars, from Rijeka to Zagreb to Sarajevo--with, as always, the long shadow of the Second World War looming overhead. Her singular layering of details--from lung damage to silk scarves to the family budget to old romances--offers an almost unbearable closeness to the characters and their moment in history. "Wry and kindly, funny, angry, informed and intent on the truth, no voice is quite as blisteringly beautiful as that of Drndic" (Financial Times).

Battle Songs

EEG Dasa Drndic

Contemporary

MacLehose Press

Leica Format

Canzone di Guerra

Istros Books

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