Description
A soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition and failure—Ivana Sajko paints a portrait of an intellectual at a crossroads.
A man on a train, propelled from a small town on the south-eastern coast of Europe to Berlin by a gesture of violence. As the wheels turn, his feverish mind clacks along, tracing back his own past—and that of Europe—to a moment of violence he must flee, moving him further and farther away from the one person he loves.
Shipwrecks and border pushbacks; epidemics and industrial ruins; a family separated by economic necessity; a brother lost to crime; love and fear and memories of happier times in Berlin—yet through it all runs a silver thread of hope spun by a far-off friend. Every Time We Say Goodbye is an extended soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition, and failure, and is a profoundly stark and furious novel.
Praise for Every Time We Say Goodbye
“Readers familiar with Sajko’s Love Novel will remember the author’s long, absorbing stream-of-consciousness sentences. In Every Time We Say Goodbye, every chapter is a single sentence running for pages. The translator, Mima Simić, approaches her task inventively . . . the prose flows in sync with the protagonist’s thoughts: now rolling along, now jolting on the tracks, now braking hard.”
—Anna Aslanyan, Times Literary Supplement
“However grim the subject matter, the writing remains exceptionally good, with long, majestic sentences that curl unpredictably around the subject. This profound novel is superbly translated by Simić, whose translator’s note is in itself fascinating.”
—Declan O’Driscoll, Irish Times
“[Sajko’s] characteristic style resonates throughout the text in rapid changes of condensed scenes, concise and emotionally charged literary clusters of a confident pen for whom prose is always a measured experiment of rapids and explosions.”
—Ana Fazekas
Praise for Love Novel
“A devastating book, humane, original, and deeply relevant.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A sharp and claustrophobic portrait of a fraying marriage . . . Sajko never takes her foot off the gas in this potent and incendiary outing.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
“Sajko takes no prisoners . . . [Love Novel] gloriously marries sociopolitical commentary on failed capitalism in a failed state to the inevitability of failed marriage, locating the narrative in an extraordinary violence of mind and body . . . Matching form with content, it depicts lives that involve walking constantly on tightropes with a ferocity of prose that allows no breathing space, consummately conveying the claustrophobic existence of the characters as external as well as personal circumstances close in on them.”
—Dublin Literary Award Judges’ Citation
“Love Novel is a universal story about passion and poverty that’s told in rich language.”
—Suzanne Kamata, Foreword Reviews
“Love Novel is not a comfortable read, but it is a timely exploration of socio-economic inequality, a raw confrontation of the pain humans are capable of inflicting on one another, and a fearless engagement with the challenges of poverty and parenthood.”
—Helen Vassallo, Reading in Translation
