Battle Songs
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
An early novel from the masterful Drndic, Battle Songs is an intimate, ferocious account of her years spent as a refugee in Canada during the Yugoslav Wars
In the 1990s, the unnamed narrator of Battle Songs 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).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This innovative collection from Drndić (Doppelgänger) was originally published in Croatia in 2019, a year after the author's death. The five linked stories center on single mother Tea Radan and her daughter, Sara, who leave a crumbling Yugoslavia in the early 1990s for Toronto. Throughout, Drndić juxtaposes seemingly disparate subjects to make emphatic statements about the wartime struggles of Croatians, both refugees in 1990s Canada and those who confronted the Nazis during WWII. In "Little Unfinished Story," a history of the domestication of pigs is interlaced with refugees' accounts of their means of survival, such as a classical musician who sells toys door-to-door. In "Hitler Liked Quail and Father Christmas Abandons Bosnia," Tea works a temp job stuffing envelopes. Here, and elsewhere, the author demonstrates how the characters fill their time with trivial tasks after consequential upheaval. In "Oh, Donna Clara," Drndić draws a parallel between Sara's adoption of a cat in Canada and Sara's aunt Lena adopting a daughter in 1980s Yugoslavia. Though a bit too much genealogical minutiae bogs down the lengthy centerpiece, "Glasshouses and Gallstones," it otherwise offers an engaging tale of Tea's struggles in Canada, her ancestors' interactions with the Ustasha during the 1940s, and the Nazis' Potemkin village at Terezin. The author's distinctive style makes these refugee stories sing.
