Body Kintsugi

Author(s): Celia Hawkesworth (translator), Senka Marić

Location(s): Bosnia and Herzegovina

Genre(s): Fiction, In Translation, Novella

Era(s): Early 21st Century

Location

Content

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with liquid gold, thereby highlighting and celebrating the object’s past. In this powerful and personal novel, Senka Maric uses kintsugi as a lens through which to interrogate ideas of illness and recovery. Body Kintsugi opens as our protagonist’s husband is leaving the family home. Lying awake in her bed, amidst the wreckage left by his departure, she finds a lump in her armpit. This discovery leads to a cancer diagnosis and the invasive, life-altering treatments that follow. Written in raw and immediate prose, the narrative moves easily between the present tense and scattered memories of her girlhood. The result is an intimate, insightful account of the difficulties of adolescence, ongoing patriarchal attitudes in Bosnian society, motherhood, illness and the relationship of a woman to her body, as it changes into something new – and yet, is still hers.

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