But her project might be not so much to retrieve the horrible past-much of which is unrecoverable, as her work intimates-but instead to stash parts of it, whatever she can grab hold of, in her books. “Art,” Drndić once said, “should shock, hurt, offend, intrigue, be a merciless critic of the merciless times we are not only witnessing but whose victims we have become.” Merciless Drndić is she is one of literature’s great obsessives, and her main fixation is the violence of the European twentieth century and its aftermath. Battle Songs, with Celia Hawkesworth as translator, is the sixth of the Croatian writer’s books to come out in English. For further consideration, I submit a scene in Doppelgänger, wherein an outdoor handjob between two elderly strangers, both of whom will shortly commit suicide, is interposed with an alphabetical list of some of the most radioactive signifiers of the twentieth century, from Auschwitz to Zyklon B.ĭrndić, who died in 2018, has only recently achieved widespread attention in the anglophone reading world. Much has been written about her pages-long accounting of murdered Jews in her novels Trieste and Belladonna. Whatever her narrative thrust, she is always embellishing (or interrupting) with images, footnotes, inventories, songs, police reports, snippets from other works, lists-especially lists. Daša Drndić is a novelist of startling juxtapositions.
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