An interview with Ivana Sajko, author of Every Time We Say Goodbye

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We first became aware of Ivana Sajko’s work when her previous novel showed up on the shortlist for the 2023 Dublin Impac Award. We read here in office the two or three books that had yet, that year, to find a North American publisher, but it was Ivana’s that made the rounds the fastest. The manuscript passed from hand-to-hand-to-hand-to-hand over the course of the week, each of us tearing through it in a single sitting. This wasn’t just because of its size, coming in as it did at barely one hundred pages: it was its manic, frenetic energy, its humour, its black, beating heart, its humanity. This was something quite different than anything else we’d read, a voice so superbly translated by Mima Simić that it did not read like a translation at all. Love Novel was a brutal, brilliantly immersive experience, and we were thrilled to have her, and it, for our list. I decided then that I would follow her anywhere and work to bring and break her out in English. I sensed then what I am convinced of now: that Ivana Sajko is as good a writer as any at work today in any language.

The publication of her new novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye, again in an exceptionally energetic translation by Mima Simić, merely confirms my opinion. Sajko is an author who demands to be read by those who love the work of Tokarczuk and Ernaux, among others, though Sajko’s voice is very much her own. In a world racked by so much death and destruction, this is a novel about the most painful death of them all: the death of love. As our narrator leaves his homeland of Croatia for Berlin, watching the countryside slide by his window, he attempts to avoid the full crushing heartache of this more private death, and his role in its occurrence, by reflecting on the recent history of Europe and his inability as a failed journalist to document what is happening in a way that might affect change: this is a novel very much about our current terrifying moment. But lest you feel that this is too bleak, there is a real thread of hope running through the book as well, even if it is only the hope of starting anew knowing the mistakes that have brought you to this point, and your determination in the face of habit and exhaustion not to give in to the same destructive impulses again. Simić’s translation of Sajko’s prose moves with the same rhythm of the train her protagonist is escaping on, offering its own very real pleasures as it pins you, in its extended sentences, to your seat, determined to make you look clearly at what has been wrought.

Published on Tuesday, today it received a rave review in the New York Times, while also making the Globe and Mail’s Spring reading list. Below, we have a short clip of Ivana reading from this book, as well as an excellent interview conducted by Ahmed Abdalla.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

An Interview with Ivana Sajko

Author of Every Time We Say Goodbye (trans. Mima Simić)

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how this book came about?

I am a playwright and prose writer who has been living in Berlin for over ten years. Before that, I moved around Europe, and whenever I returned to Croatia it was most often to the Adriatic coast, which always had a huge influence on my life. From there comes my close relationship with the sea, its blueness, with the Mediterranean province and the conflict between its positive and negative sides. Every Time We Say Goodbye is my fourth novel, written during the first year of lockdown in Berlin, when we were living in a kind of vacuum, with enough time to reflect on our fragility, to mourn our losses, and to reimagine how the post-Covid society could look like (seems we missed that particular opportunity).

What readers of the English translation cannot fully experience is that the book was written in the masculine grammatical gender. Most Slavic languages allow narration from a specific gender—masculine, feminine, or neuter (although neuter is typically associated with inanimate objects, so while it is grammatically possible to write from it, it sounds semantically strange). Those of us who grew up with a Slavic language—as I did with Croatian—know how deeply we are shaped by the gender through which we have to speak. Choosing to write in the masculine somehow altered the course of the novel as it unfolded. It helped me step outside myself, and outside the female voice I had always used, the voice with an entirely different tone and destiny. I would not dare to call this a trans experience, but it certainly made me aware of how strongly we are determined by language. Language truly makes us who we are—not only in social interaction, but also in the most intimate sense.

But how did the book come into being? I think that with every book I return to certain obsessive motifs of mine: the departure, and the experience of the foreigner. In Berlin, for example, one can clearly distinguish different categories of being a foreigner, one can differentiate between an emigrant, an expat, a refugee, a tourist, and these categories are often predetermined by national, religious, or even racial prejudices. As for me, I have been an emigrant for most of my life, but my artistic profession enabled me to do it with dignity and to call it my decision, not my necessity. That was my rebellion—to leave. My family history is traditionally one of emigration. They originated from the small city at the Adriatic coast from where they traveled as far as Argentina, returning only in the 1940s. In Yugoslavia, emigration meant going to Germany. I grew up with emigrant stories, and perhaps I was simply waiting for the right moment to write my own.

In the book, he’s someone who chooses to leave. But he does encounter those for whom it’s not a choice.

Yes, there are always those who are forced to leave their homeland—because of war, because of poverty—and those who leave because they have imagined a better place. This second option carries a certain romantic aura; it recalls a time when American writers moved en masse to Paris, traveled through Europe, and created the literary male figure of the foreign wanderer who owns nothing but a typewriter, cigarettes, and—to make the style more convincing—a hat. That male figure has accompanied me while I was young, and I envied him, because very few women were ever allowed such freedom. Perhaps this is also why I chose to write in the masculine gender: to appropriate that position of power and choice for myself.

Anyhow, the question of those who are forced to leave is one of the great questions of our time, and it places us before a moral test. Especially in Europe, where the arms industry profits enormously in the very countries from which refugees come. These millions of refugees continually confront us with a tragedy in which we are, if nothing else, implicated through our silence and inertia. I live in the center of Berlin, and across the street from my building there is a reception center for refugees from Ukraine. When I lived in Zagreb in my early twenties, on the same street there was a hotel housing war refugees from eastern Croatia. In this sense, exile is not an abstract or distant concept for me; it has always been my neighbourhood.

In my Berlin district there are very few Germans. Most residents are Arabs and people of Turkish origin. Their families have lived in Berlin for several generations, yet do not hold citizenship, do not vote, and do not participate in shaping the fate of the country they depend on. On the one hand, neighbourhoods like mine are vibrant and alive; they fascinate tourists because they show how cultures, religions, and languages can coexist. But beneath this colourful multicultural label lie deep inequalities and unresolved issues.

Can you talk about the structure and why you chose to write each chapter as one long sentence?

I tend to write long sentences, because my inner experience of text and writing is essentially an experience of music and composition. This may stem from the theatre, which is my professional background: for many years I performed on stage with musicians, and I wrote texts almost aloud, repeating and varying them until they would fit my own throat (so to say), the rhythm of my breathing, the dynamics of my speech.

Every sentence in the book is like a long journey, moving through different spaces and times. But isn’t that also the way we remember? When we sink into memory we are caught in a stream which is volatile, full of ellipses, fictions, inner conflicts. Memory is not structured into sentences and paragraphs. Memory is carried by chance and emotion, like a rushing stream of water. I wanted to tame that torrent into a rhythmic flow that would guide the readers, their attention and their feelings. This approach is akin to directing a text in the theatre, where the director ultimately guides the spectator’s gaze.

One of the epigraphs to the novel is a quote from the playwright Goran Ferčec saying he’s only interested in writing that exhausts the world. Is that what you’re trying to go for? To exhaust this one man’s entire world as a way of moving forward?

Moving forward while looking back, because with the distance, things, people and relationships appear differently.

I have never been a writer of grand narratives. I am more interested in exploring micro-situations and human states. I am driven to find the richness of great conflicts and unexpected interpretations in seemingly unremarkable, pale moments—to dig deep and to discover a scandal in the middle of nowhere, or to uncover disputes and arguments in the silence, among the unuttered sentences. These are my passions as a writer.

The same is true of this book. It follows a man on a train journey, between point A and point B, between the place he has left and the place he has not yet reached—in the in-between space of disappointment and hope. And although he does nothing much but sit in his seat, there is the history of his family across several generations unfolding before us. The history marked by departures and violence.

I’ve heard you describe this book as kind of hopeful, but there’s a lot of dark stuff in there. I’m wondering where you see that? Is it in the idea of leaving and starting fresh?

Yes, I truly believe that hope lies at the core of this book. Hope that it is possible to break the chain reaction of the recurring destinies, and that it is indeed possible to heal the inherited traumas. In this book, there is a way out. And it starts at the beginning, from the beginning, from zero, almost in a Zen Buddhist sense: point is in emptying the cup before you can fill it with tea again.

I found it interesting in the book that you never name where he’s from, but you do name where he’s going. Why is that?

The place I come from—Croatia—is heavily exoticized from the perspective of Western Europe, where I now live. On the one hand, Croatia is often subsumed into the mythical territory of the Balkans, imagined as a cursed part of Europe steeped in barbarism; on the other, it is viewed through the lens of the civil war in which Yugoslavia collapsed during my youth. My wish is to avoid this kind of exoticization, partly because I do not want to condone the idea that European barbarism is tied to its Southeast, when it is in fact deeply embedded in the historical legacy of west Europe: its imperialism, the theft of cultural heritage and material resources from other peoples, as well as contemporary forms of barbarism: the silence surrounding the genocide in Gaza, the racism directed at Syrians in distress, and the cowardice shown in defending democracy and international law, which for years have been attacked from one side by Putin and from the other by Trump. For this reason, I do not want to write from a national perspective in my books. And honestly, I no longer truly have one. I have lived in many European cities and I consider myself a European writer who observes this small, complicated, and often arrogantly self-assured European nest with a critical eye. At the table in our kitchen, German, English, and Croatian are spoken simultaneously, and that is why I consciously write about Europe, rather than about Croatia alone.

Can you talk about the influence of film in the book?

Lars von Trier’s film Europa is the code that grants entry into the novel, the keynote that sets the tone for the journey the book offers, a journey in which the train, rushing forward, in fact moves backward. I often draw on other people’s art, music, visual works, films. This is also my way of entering into dialogue with artists I admire and who inspire me.

Is there anything you hope people take away from reading this book?

I would like readers to carry with them the belief that the end can be the beginning, that there is immense beauty even in sorrow, that there is a memory of love after the love is gone, that a failure opens millions of new possibilities and that in every place of loss, something still blooms.

In good publicity news:

• Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simić) received two great excellent publicity during it’s pub week:
  • Review in the New York Times: “[A] captivating new novel . . . translator Mima Simić shows great dexterity in her rendering of Sajko’s lyrical, run-on sentences. They hurtle forward like a TGV, making manifest Iv.’s struggle to speak of his despair and the continent’s.”
  • Featured in the Globe and Mail’s Spring Books Preview: “The form suits the novel’s action, which involves a disillusioned Croatian journalist travelling by train to Berlin, where he reflects on a Europe in crisis, personal trauma and the losses that have left him alienated from his work, past and sense of belonging.”
• Oblivious by Elaine Dewar was also included in the Globe and Mail’s Spring Books Preview: “Dewar’s last book (completed shortly before she died last year) exposes, in new ways, the pitiless machinery behind residential schools, segregated hospitals and race-based exploitation that took place on the Prairies—all while settlers’ descendants invited west by the government prospered on the same lands.”
• Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio was reviewed in Alberta Views: “Recommended reading for anyone who is concerned about the treatment of migrant workers in Canada. But . . . a must-read for anyone who has never thought much about the migrants living among us.”
• On Sportsby David Macfarlane was mentioned in Toronto Life: “On Sports explores his personal love of the game and distaste for the commercialization of competition.”