4.0
Belladonna
ByPublisher Description
Winner of 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation
From the author of the highly acclaimed Trieste, a fierce novel about history, memory, and illness
Andreas Ban, a psychologist who no longer psychologizes, a writer who no longer writes, lives alone in a coastal town in Croatia. His body is failing him. He sifts through the remnants of his life—his research, books, medical records, photographs—remembering old lovers and friends, the tragedies of WWII, the breakup of Yugoslavia. Ban’s memories of Belgrade (which he thought he had left behind) and of Amsterdam (a different world and life) alternate with meditations on hole-ridden time (ebbing away through its perforations), on his measly pension, on growing old and fragile, on the intelligence of rats and the agelessness of lobsters, on deadly nightshade. He tries to push the past away, "to land on a little island of time in which tomorrow does not exist, in which yesterday is buried.” Drndic´ leafs through the horrors of history with a cold unflinching wit. “The past is riddled with holes,” she writes. “Souvenirs can’t help here.” And they don't.Download the free Fable app
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities21 Reviews
4.0
Laura
Created 3 months agoShare
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“Després d’haver fet dos treballs de la uni sobre aquest llibre m’he dignat a llegir-lo (no tinc vergonya). M’ha generat molt mal de món i molta pena, la sensació que viuré una guerra i m’ha fet relativitzar coses de la vida. El recomano molt, narra una història que es trenca constantment perque literalment l’horror no es pot explicar de cap altra manera ❤️”
brielle
Created 5 months agoShare
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tean
Created 8 months agoShare
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Jonathan Eisen
Created 11 months agoShare
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“A novel that rewrites what a novel can and should do in your brain (and heart) while reading it. No summary could ever do justice to what the experience of reading the book is. Simultaneously propels you inwardly and outwardly through time (and space) to help us come just a tad closer to understand what we are all doing on this planet.
Belladonna is thus both a difficult and easy read. It is the latter because it sweeps you into it so naturally, but it is difficult because it forces you to reckon with those elements of life and death that are so central to our experience but we prefer not to think about when we move about daily. In other words, it's so far from an escapist work that, each time you pick up the book, you must give yourself space to process what you are reading.
In this way, I don't recommend the novel lightly. It's not sentimental. You may not understand what the book is doing to you while it's working.”
mari
Created over 1 year agoShare
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“revejo-me demasiado no andreas ban enquanto mulher de 22 anos… a minha psicóloga vai gostar de ouvir sobre isto”
About Daša Drndic
Daša Drndic (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.
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