Lead Review
- Book: Love Novel
- Location: Balkans
- Author: Mima Simić (Translator), Sajko Ivana
This is a short novel of around 100 pages that opens with a blast of powerful writing. A couple is in the middle of a frantic verbal exchange that captures the heat and power of stark words. It is one of the most powerful openers I have read.
The couple is incarcerated in what seems to be a small apartment. The female escapes to take on small acting roles and returns to the heated and visceral atmosphere of home. I imagine them living in a grey, dormitory suburb where the pleasures of life are diminished, incarcerated in Ostblock architecture.
Soon the author introduces a child bawling from its cot, affected by the combative parents, a tragedy for any child to witness.
This novel is lacerating in style, long sentences weave their way across the page, an incessant parade of words, clauses and subclauses, a roiling of paragraphs that reflect to the content. The translator, in the Translator’s Note at the end, says that it took her a year to translate, although it was a short read – every time she opened the book, it felt like a punch in the gut, a punch by someone I knew, a family member. This is the nub of the novel, the familiarity of two people confined within four walls, a fire just waiting to be lit at every turn, the wrecking ball of love in such close proximity to hate.
This is a short but intense read.
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