From that day on, I began to
notice that people in difficult situations express themselves exclusively in
monologues. Trapped in the conviction that they have to have their own opinion,
stance and judgement, they don’t notice that it makes things even worse for
them; they don’t hear the others.
I generally don’t open my reviews with quotes from the
novels but this one is such a wonderful observation that I couldn’t help but
open with a bang. This book is littered with an amazing array of these
observations.
The back cover of Marija Knezevic’s “Ekaterini” informs us
that “while written in homage to the ancient story of Odysseus this remarkable
novel sees the roles reversed, so that it is a modern Penelope who must travel
and suffer in search of her homeland”. Our heroine here is Ekaterini, the
grandmother of our narrator (who is nameless but is referred to once as
Marilyn, after Marilyn Monroe), who spends the majority of her life in wartime
and planning to go home. Greek by birth she marries an immigrant worker and
follows him to Belgrade, there she witnesses the collapse of Yugoslavia, the
last Balkan war, the Kosovo crisis and the bombing of Belgrade” as well as losing her husband. A single
mother raising two daughters this is a rare gem whereby the female characters
aren’t shaped or moulded, nor put into the shadows of their male counterparts,
they are the lead here. A truly female novel (and they are rare to find, at one
stage I did recall Carol Shields’ “unless” an unashamedly feminist novel, but
here a more subtle example);
The lives of women, if we accept
that ever more dubious biological dichotomy, are still little explored. In
literature, as well as in psychology and other disciplines largely informed by
literature, women are viewed, described and analysed either by men or in
relation to men. Female communities remain unchartered, although much happens
in them, perhaps more than in the vertical postulates of father-son and
child-father-mother. Female stories are more like overlapping circles on a horizontal,
very flat surface, and sometimes they overlap. That flat, flat, flatness’ is
all I remember from the poem ‘Three Women’ by Sylvia Plath. Details of the kind
that the menstrual cycles of women who live together synchronise over time are
not insignificant. Women build a zone of understanding among themselves, which
is naturally inaccessible to others, while at the same time constantly vying
with each other, and only in such communities do people discover the
significance of the inviolability of
personal space. A woman who once gets to know her own territory with never
relinquish it and will defend it at all costs from everyone, even from her own
children. Sometimes even to her own detriment.
Here we have a novel with the men merely the shadows, but of
course the ones who have dictated the course of the women’s history. Ekaterini,
her daughter and her daughter (Ekaterini’s grandchild and the narrator) are the
stories here, from different lands, different languages and cultures they
explore and interact, struggle and survive in a harsh world, one that is being
destroyed and moulded by men.
As per a number of novels that I have reviewed over the
years we do have the constant struggle with identity, the inability to find
somewhere that we truly call home, the displacement etc. but unlike a large
number this novel manages to perfectly articulate that struggle. Ekaterini’s
journey (like Odysseus) to finally return to Greece, there is no Trojan Horse
(or is there with a stalemate at the border) but we do have a peaceful
settlement.
Another novel which explores the eternal existentialist
angst, the wars are going on all around, the bombs are dropping, the fear is
real, but the battle to know oneself, to understand one’s existence and meaning
is a battle that continues throughout this novel.
Our first and very major
limitation is that we don’t know what it is like to be born. Form that very
first moment on, we depend on other people’s versions and we have no way of
learning the truth. Everyone talks about how they felt; no one even
thinks that we might have felt something at the time too, let alone what,
although we were the cause of all those manifestations of happiness,
excitement, fear, inebriation and sobering-up because of the birth of a child.
Marija Knezevic has published fourteen books of poetry,
fiction and essays and has won the Dura Jaksic Award for her poetry collection
‘In tactum” and her poetic language shines through here, obviously giving the
translator, Will Firth, a decent challenge. There were a few times where I did
have to reread a sentence or two, maybe not the translator’s fault, just my
ignorance of nuance.
The world is sometimes beautiful,
but language is always a miracle. ‘I know that you miss here most: jokes in
your own language,’ an American friend said. It’s a widely held belief that
when we live in a different place for a long time the ‘here’ and the ‘there’
converge almost to the point of overlapping. Real bonds are those between two
abstractions. Ekaterini’s daughters teased her for forgetting Greek and never
learning Serbian properly. I was horrible and told her on a completely
different occasion that she spoke like the Serbian-Greek comedy figure Kir
Janja, but she didn’t get angry. She took these comments as if they didn’t
relate to her at all, as if they were beyond her and from a totally different
plane. She knew that no one could fathom the mystery of language; and she knew
that she didn’t know, which is a significant realisation. That’s why she so
readily became melancholic whenever she heard Greek songs, even if she didn’t
understand all of the words; she longed to hear those words and their sound,
their melody, as she used to say.
Language is pure longing. Our first and final love, although we only discover
it through its lack.
A worthwhile novel to hunt down, again you’d be supporting
an independent publisher and exploring the little exposed Balkan literature, an
area I’ve wifely enjoyed through Istros Books.
My copy was courtesy of the publisher. http://istrosbooks.com/products/books/ekaterini-27/
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