Fatherland: A Family History
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
New York Times Bestseller
An NPR Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection
Winner of the Doug Wright Award for Best Book
Shortlisted for the PACA Literary Award
"A heartfelt and extremely absorbing examination of exile, reconciliation and destructive politics…as vividly immediate as any headline." —Rachel Cooke, Guardian
Standing alongside Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Joe Sacco's Palestine, Nina Bunjevac's Fatherland renders the searing history of the Balkans in the twentieth century through the experiences of the author and her family. In 1975, fearing her husband’s growing fanaticism, Nina Bunjevac's mother fled her marriage and adopted country of Canada, taking Nina—then only a toddler—and her older sister back to Yugoslavia to live with her parents. Her husband and Nina's father, Peter, was a die-hard Serbian nationalist who was forced to leave his country in the 1950s. Remaining in Canada, he became involved with a terrorist organization bent on overthrowing the Communist Yugoslav government and attacking its supporters in North America. Then in 1977, while his family was still in Yugoslovia, Peter was killed in an accidental explosion while building a bomb.
Through exquisite and haunting black-and-white art, Nina Bunjevac documents the immediate circumstances surrounding her father's death and provides a sweeping account of the former Yugoslovia under Fascism and Communism, telling an unforgettable true story of how the scars of history are borne by family and nation alike.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bunjevac's debut graphic novel is a fascinating, eerie memoir of her fraught family history of exile and immigration, focusing on her father's involvement in a violent Serbian nationalist group that, in the 1970s, attempted to overthrow the Communist regime in Yugoslavia. The author herself appears as only a peripheral character, mostly as a small child. The central figures of the story are her parents, and she follows them as they face difficult challenges, such as extricating themselves from the terrorist group, and being forced to sacrifice one child for the sake of the others. The book is heavy on narration, and since the action spans many locations and decades of Nina's family history, sometimes it's difficult to get to know any character very well. Yet Bunjevac is masterful at presenting an impression of the confusion, disruption, and fear ingrained in the family. The illustrations are unusual and extraordinarily rendered. Most are stiff and ominous, like lost photographs, the cross-hatching so tight and even that the figures look like they are molded from snakeskin a very effective manifestation of the darkness and distance of the book.
