Every Time We Say Goodbye
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
'… every departure is a little death, every departure always clings to what it leaves behind, and every one deserves its own photo, its own legend …'
A man on a train, propelled from a small town on the south-eastern coast of Europe to Berlin by a gesture of violence. As the wheels turn, his mind roams free in a feverish attempt to trace the genealogy of that violence in his own past and that of Europe as a whole. A man in search of a destination where he can be a stranger – but has that better place since ceased to exist?
Shipwrecks and border pushbacks; epidemics and industrial ruins; a family divided by economic necessity; a brother lost to crime; love and fear and memories of happier times in Berlin – yet through it all runs a silver thread of hope spun by a far-off friend.
A profound novel of contemporary Europe in the stark and furious voice of Dublin Prize-shortlisted Ivana Sajko, powerfully translated by Mima Simić.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The unnamed narrator of this intense and recursive work from Sajko unfurls an angst-fueled account of his train trip from Croatia to Berlin. He has left in a rush, driven by emotional turmoil over the deaths of his violent father and self-involved mother, as well as a recent breakup with his girlfriend. His memories are vivid, and as the train makes its way up the coast, he circles through fond recollections of his grandmother, who lived in a rustic village and doted on him, and memories of his confusion as a teen during the Balkan Wars. A journalist by trade, he's chronically afflicted with writer's block, and fancies himself a modern-day Baudelaire. He peppers the narrative with cultural references, from Jean Genet's theories about war photography (the narrator agrees with Genet that "a photograph's precision doesn't make you a witness") to Pearl Jam, remembering how their song about a classroom suicide played years earlier during a nightclub shooting. The sluggish train suffers multiple delays and route changes, a perfect metaphor for the narrator's aimlessness and anxiety, "meandering and circling around what hurts the most and yet cannot be changed as it shrinks into nothingness behind me." Sajko's blackhearted modernist novel is worth a look.
