Belladonna - Planning, Background and General (no spoilers)

[Vesna]

I thought to start this general discussion with a brief bio of the author, often relevant for her novels, and a few links. Daša Drndić was born in 1946 in Zagreb, then part of Yugoslavia and now Croatia. She was 7 years old when her family moved to Belgrade (Serbia) where she grew up, lived and worked for 40 years. The wars and breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s caused a dramatic turn in her life. She left Belgrade in 1992, briefly living in Rijeka and Toronto, to settle back in Rijeka, an Istrian city in Croatia, in 1997.

Although she had a successful career as a publishing editor, professor of English literature, a cultural editor on radio, and an author of radio plays during her lifetime before the Yugoslav breakup, she was a “late bloomer” as a literary fiction writer. In the last 15-20 years of her life, she wrote a series of novels that have made her one of the greatest literary writers to come from the former Yugoslavia. Several of these, including Belladonna, were written while also suffering from recurring cancer.

Belladonna was originally published in 2012 in Croatia and the English translation by Celia Hawkesworth was published in 2017. It was shortlisted for the inaugural EBRD (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) Award and posthumously won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation in 2018.

I’ve collected a few links in English but everyone is welcome to please add more details, comments or links. As standard in the group, we will have separate threads to discuss the contents of the book in detail.

“There Are No Small Fascisms: An Interview with Daša Drndić” (The Paris Review):
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017/08/21/there-are-no-small-fascisms-interview-with-dasa-drndic/

Her posthumous profile by the late Eileen Battersby with fragments from her conversation with the author:
https://www.calvertjournal.com/articl...

and Battersby's Belladonna review:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-triumph-of-memory-on-dasa-drndics-belladonna/

The poignant last 6-7 minutes of the BBC Open Book (starts at ca. 21 minutes into the program) with a short but very informative homage to Drndić by her publisher in England. It also includes the segment with Drndić herself reading “A Literary Postcard from My Homeland” that she was requested to write for the program. She read it shortly before her death.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b0b6fbs3

[Hugh]

Thanks Vesna. I hope to finish the book tonight - it is my third Drndić novel after Doppelgänger and Trieste.

[Vesna]

Thank you, Hugh. I read her EEG: A Novel which I loved and it just now won yet another posthumous award (BTBA). It is a sequel to Belladonna but my understanding is that the only major connector in terms of a possible "spoiler" is the beginning of EEG which starts with cutting through any dilemma as to what happened to the main character at the end of Belladonna. As you know from her novels, her story-telling is nonlinear so I think it's fine that I already finished her EEG.

[Paul]

That's wonderful Vesna.

One thing I do love from her novels is how they are all connected - there is a major connection between Doppelgänger and Trieste - and Trieste itself has several cross-overs into Belladonna which are worth looking out for.

Given the English publication order is out of sync may be helpful to set out her final 6 novels in original order as it explains the Doppelgänger - Trieste - Belladonna - EEG flow:

Doppelgänger (2002), translated into English as Doppelgänger ( 2018) by Celia Hawkesworth and SD Curtis

Leica Format (2003), translated into English as Leica Format (2015) by Celia Hawkesworth

Sonnenschein (2007), translated into English as Trieste (2012) by Ellen Elias-Bursać

April u Berlinu (2009), as yet untranslated

Belladonna (2012), translated into English as Belladonna 2017, by Celia Hawkesworth

E.E.G (2016), translated into English as E.E.G. (2018), by Celia Hawkesworth

[Hugh]

I finished the book yesterday. I won't comment in detail until we have spoiler threads (not that spoilers mean much with this kind of book). My Review