Love Novel
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the HKW Internationaler Literaturpreis • Shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award • One of The Millions Most Anticipated Titles of 2024 • One of Kirkus Reviews' Twenty Books You Can Read in a Weekend • One of the Boston Globe's Anticipated Forthcoming Titles • An American Bookseller's Association Indie Next Pick
Love in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us to the frontlines of a war waged between kitchen and bedroom.
Love in late capitalism: in an unnamed city, a husband and wife wage a silent war of rage and resentment. He, an out-of-work Dante scholar, is trying to change the world—and write a novel. She was once a passable actress, but now she’s failing at breastfeeding. They take on gigs and debts. He drinks cheap wine; she cleans obsessively. In their two-room flat the tension rises and turns exquisite: the rent is past due, their careers have stalled, the regime is crumbling, and there’s always the baby, the baby who won’t stop crying.
Intense and astutely ironic, devastating and darkly comic, Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel takes a scalpel to the heart of modern married life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sajko's roiling whirlpool of a novel, her first to be translated into English, is a sharp and claustrophobic portrait of a fraying marriage. The husband and wife (an unemployed Dante scholar and a former actor, respectively) have one young child together and struggle to pay for their apartment (the characters and their city are unnamed). Neither are happy. She works a lousy job wearing costumes to promote movies at premieres and goes to an Easter party despite finding Jesus "annoying"; he resolves to leave her, only to stay and try to write a novel. The narrative is circular, always returning to the same unresolved arguments and unvoiced resentments—that is, until their money troubles finally catch up with them and their electricity is shut off. There are plenty of memorable lines ("that was yet another small problem with love, that it lies like a tombstone") nestled in long paragraphs composed of extended, winding sentences that effectively drill down into the marriage's corroded underbelly. Sajko never takes her foot off the gas in this potent and incendiary outing.
