![]() ![]() ![]() Add to those miseries a few digressions into similar lives, others whose aspirations have collapsed into a “shriveled nothing,” then remove just about all happy memories (Ban pines for a lover, Elvira, but we learn little about her except that she died young), and then stir in the soul-devouring bureaucracy in his native Croatia, “a small, ruined, pompous country”-altogether, it’s the recipe for Novel as Suicide Note. An author and scholar, he knows his Continent has moved on he sees the refugees out of Libya and Syria, but his own anguish nearly always has to do with the horrors of six or seven decades earlier.īan suffers that past as virulently as he does the degradations of aging, its male breast cancer and spinal decay. These and other “obscenities of the Second World War” surface like a “slimy rivulet” on every street of Europe, the stench inescapable for Andreas Ban, Drndić’s protagonist. Names of the murdered, to be sure: victims of the Holocaust. ![]()
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