Doppelgänger
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Drndi 's pair of unusual, slightly connected novellas (following EEG), explores the depths of loneliness in post-Soviet Croatia. The first novella, "Artur and Isabella," depicts an unusual meeting between two elderly strangers on New Year's Eve, 1999. Artur is incontinent and collects hats. Isabella collects garden gnomes that act as stand-ins for a large family lost to the Holocaust. Each grapples with fading memory; the text fractures repeatedly with interspersed vignettes such as typed out police surveillance inventories of the contents of their respective apartments. The second, longer work, "Pupi" is more ambitious and less comprehensible, the action moving back and forth through time as the lead, Printz, a former spy for the government, attends his mother's funeral, watches rhinoceroses injure themselves, reminisces about his lost childhood love, feuds with his brother, and returns silverware sacked in WWII to its original Jewish family. Lists (a long sequence of bipolar writers and artists, an alphabetized list of Holocaust-related terminology such as Eugenik and Zyklon B) and long chunks of dialogue pepper the action. The bleakness can be overwhelming, but this volume has much to offer, with surprising links between the two stories and insights into the ravages of time and mental illness. These two novellas are a testament to Drndi 's considerable talents.
