When it's a matter of food, there's no prejudice, the national question doesn't arise.ħ. They serve all manner of things from former Yugoslavia. When they have something to celebrate, they invite a lot of people and then they feed them well. Every Friday they get together in an Irish pub that has a terrace on its roof with a lot of plants, and they drink Irish beer.ģ. (Because social security offices have the right to examine bank accounts and so on.)Ģ.
L When they arrive, they ask friends to look after the local money they have from the apartments they sold and they register for social security. The novel is in a collage form - ostensibly a tale of exile but including recipes for survival under UN aid, a history of Vietnamese pork bellied pigs, a discussion of Sikhism, a guide to behaviour of Yugoslav exiles (particularly from Serbia) in Canada, the questionnaire required to adopt a cat in Canada, lists of historical documents (the list of victims in the later novel is much more powerful), and - perhaps the heart of the novel but not easy for this reader to follow - a family history from around the time of WW2 (when some Croatians were members of the pro-Nazi Ustaše), replete with footnotes, some from the original and some glosses from the translator.įor example from the guide WHAT DO (SOME OTHER) IMMIGRANTS DO IN CANADA AFTER THE BREAK-UP OF SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA? I wouldn't suggest a reader new to Daša Drndić start here - her novels in translation reach their peak with Trieste, Belladonna and E.E.G., but it is an interesting work nevertheless. Both books have the protagonist living in exile, with their young daughter, in the Canadian city, escaping the conflicts around the breakup of the Yugoslav federation, although in Canzone di Guerra the narrator is the ficticious Tea Radan. This LA Review of Books article puts the book in the context of the author's oeuvre (see below) including the (untranslated) 1997 book of memoir, Dying in Toronto. Because, for instance, what is sold now as democracy is, in fact, levelling, in fact it is restriction, a great restriction that threatens a whole lot of small restrictions by the police for everyone who does not submit.Ĭanzone di Guerra is Celia Hawkesworth's 2022 translation of the late Daša Drndić's 1998 novel of the same name.
It is here, it is all here, hidden, transformed into democracy, which is not that. Now, there is, supposedly, none of that, and all the filth of those times has been swept under the carpet. There was fascism, there was communism and the bugbears of communism. I discovered a lot of secrets, a lot of combinations, dark, political, religious, ideological, personal, to do with chess spying, double and triple secret agents from all camps, secret police involved in dirty activities.
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