Battle Songs

by Dasa Drndic, Celia Hawkesworth (Translator)

Overview

An early novel from the masterful Drndić, Battle Songs is an intimate, ferocious account of her years spent as a refugee in Canada during the Yugoslav Wars

In the 1990s, the unnamed narrator of Battle Songs leaves Yugoslavia with her daughter Sara to Toronto to start a new life. They, along with other refugees, encounter a new country but not a new home. Book editors sell hotdogs, mathematicians struggle to get by on social security, violinists hawk cheap goods on the street. Years after arriving in Canada, when she thinks no one can hear her, Sara still sings in the shower: What can we do to make things better, what can we do to make things better, la-la-la-la.

In true Drndić style, the novel has no one time or place. It is interspersed with stories from the Yugoslav Wars, from Rijeka to Zagreb to Sarajevo—with, as always, the long shadow of the Second World War looming overhead. Her singular layering of details—from lung damage to silk scarves to the family budget to old romances—offers an almost unbearable closeness to the characters and their moment in history. “Wry and kindly, funny, angry, informed and intent on the truth, no voice is quite as blisteringly beautiful as that of Drndić” (Financial Times).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811234788
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	02/07/2023
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	1,082,775
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Daša Drndić (1946-2018) wrote Trieste—"splendid, absorbing" (The New York Times)—shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize; Belladonna—"one of the strangest and strongest books" (TLS)— winner of the 2018 Warwick Prize; and EEG—"a masterpiece" (Joshua Cohen). She also wrote plays, criticism, radio plays, and documentaries.

Celia Hawkesworth was Senior Lecturer in Serbian and Croatian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London until her retirement. She has published numerous articles and several books on Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian literature, including a study Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West, and Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia. She has also published numerous translations, including several works by Ivo Andric and Dubravka Ugresic.

Editorial Reviews

12/05/2022

This innovative collection from Drndić (Doppelgänger) was originally published in Croatia in 2019, a year after the author’s death. The five linked stories center on single mother Tea Radan and her daughter, Sara, who leave a crumbling Yugoslavia in the early 1990s for Toronto. Throughout, Drndić juxtaposes seemingly disparate subjects to make emphatic statements about the wartime struggles of Croatians, both refugees in 1990s Canada and those who confronted the Nazis during WWII. In “Little Unfinished Story,” a history of the domestication of pigs is interlaced with refugees’ accounts of their means of survival, such as a classical musician who sells toys door-to-door. In “Hitler Liked Quail and Father Christmas Abandons Bosnia,” Tea works a temp job stuffing envelopes. Here, and elsewhere, the author demonstrates how the characters fill their time with trivial tasks after consequential upheaval. In “Oh, Donna Clara,” Drndić draws a parallel between Sara’s adoption of a cat in Canada and Sara’s aunt Lena adopting a daughter in 1980s Yugoslavia. Though a bit too much genealogical minutiae bogs down the lengthy centerpiece, “Glasshouses and Gallstones,” it otherwise offers an engaging tale of Tea’s struggles in Canada, her ancestors’ interactions with the Ustasha during the 1940s, and the Nazis’ Potemkin village at Terezin. The author’s distinctive style makes these refugee stories sing. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Drndić interweaves fiction, reality, history, and memory to terrific effect, producing unforgettable meditations on love and loss, the insanity of war and the legacy of human cruelty."

The White Review - Lucy Popescu

"Drndić cannot be dispassionate. Her work throbs like a hurt human heart."

Words Without Borders

"Her writing glows with an incendiary bleakness worthy of Beckett."

The Arts Desk - Boyd Tonkin

"Drndić’s formidable intelligence and Homeric intention cannot help but thrill and exalt."

The Paris Review - Dustin Illingworth

"Battle Songs is bleak but not hopeless, and Drndić’s inventive style carries the reader along without allowing the disillusionment of the book to become disillusionment with the experience of reading it. Those new to Drndić will find themselves impatient to dig deeper into her writing. Fans of her previously Englished books may come away with a better idea of her artistic progression. Anyone interested in Eastern European history or the continuing playfulness of the novelistic form would do well to read Battle Songs."

Blathering Struldbrugs - Alex Tedesco

2022-11-16
A pensive series of joined stories recounting war, exile, and the natural history of pigs.

“Vesna told me that someone in a Croatian bank had said that she couldn’t understand Serbian at all.” So recounts the narrator of Drndić’s opening story, a meaningful observation inasmuch as Serbian and Croatian, while mutually intelligible languages, were spoken by implacable enemies during the civil war that broke up Yugoslavia three decades ago. Those differences have many manifestations: As another story recounts in sometimes-cumbersome detail, in different parts of the former nation the raising and consumption of swine take different forms, such that in the western Balkans, “the cult of roast suckling pig did not emit the authenticity so characteristic of their eastern neighbors.” Of course, observant Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo eschew pork to begin with, and Croatia “practices Catholicism and chokes on greasy noodles”; what drives former fellow citizens apart are the most minor of variations on food, religion, language, and all the other things of daily life. Those differences also drive many of Drndić’s characters into exile in Canada, where they find plenty of reasons to be nostalgic for the old country: “My country is just a sad, hidebound and backward province of European civilization,” notes one exile, who adds, “It’s better in my country, nevertheless. They don’t understand anything here in Canada.” In the end, it’s enough to make her return to her native land. Drndić’s stories are interwoven with memories of the old Yugoslavia, with the red neckerchiefs of young Pioneers and the midnight door-pounding of the secret police, the endless genealogical obsessions that place people in one ethnic camp or another (“There are two branches of my family...both Croatian, so when...blood cells began to be counted, I didn’t have a problem”) and, in a meaningful passing metaphor, one thing guaranteed to make pigs happy, namely “associating with other pigs.”

A searching, melancholic study of a time of terror and angst.

Kirkus Reviews