Belladonna: (MacLehose Press Editions)

Andreas Ban is a writer and a psychologist, an intellectual proper, full of empathy, but his world has been falling apart for years. When he retires with a miserable pension and finds out that he is ill, he gains a new perspective on the debris of his life and the lives of his friends. In defying illness and old age, Andreas Ban is cynical and powerful, and in his investigations into his own past, he learns stories told by the disempowered, hunted down and helpless, stories that uncompromisingly lay bare a gamut of taboos. In BELLADONNA, Da a Drndic pushes to the limit the issues about illness and the (im)possibility of living (and dying) in contemporary, utterly dehumanised world where old age and illness are the scarlet letters of shame thrown in the face of the advertised eternal youth and beauty. BELLADONNA brings together fiction and reality, and Andreas Ban stands for a true hero of our times; he is a castaway intellectual of a society which subdues every critical thought under the disguise of political correctness.

About the Author :
Dasa Drndic is a distinguished Croatian novelist, playwright and literary critic, author of radio plays and documentaries. She is the author of Trieste (2012) and Leica Format (2015). Trieste was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2013, and has now been translated into many languages.

Review :
You read this generous, angry, and candid novel of ideas in a continuing state of wondrous disquiet . . . Belladonna is brutal, beautiful, and unforgettable. Daša Drndic achieves her mission, proving that silence cannot erase the past. Memory stalks us, and always triumphs Daša Drndic, whose razor-edged wit and outspoken courage glints and slices across every page . . . cultivates a visionary art of memory . . . In Belladonna, her writing glows with an incendiary bleakness worthy of Beckett . . . But along with that asperity and melancholy comes a gallows humour that often swings into an uproarious mood of mischief and absurdity. This book is literature with a capital L and Drndic is a miracle maker conjuring some optimism from despair and charm amid the grisly Drndic stares directly into the inky sins of us all and doesn't blink. Belladonna is a thrilling book. Unforgettable in the seamless way the author combines the real world and the fictional until it no longer matters because, in the end, all of it is the truth. This panoramic work by Drndic is less a novel than a life's worth of reminiscences annotated with photographs and copious footnotes, reminiscent of the works of Aleksandar Hemon and W.G. Sebald . . . This work may well be the national novel of Croatia. A very fine novel, wise and brave. Her fiction is very powerful statement fiction, and yet somehow the quality, the humanity, the playfulness actually counters the polemical intent. This is an extraordinary book. The novel is multi-faceted, sharp, surprising, darkly and grimly hilarious, relevant to our times, and possesses limitless depth. It also bristles with intelligence and defiance in every paragraph, like an exceptionally erudite and alert porcupine. Belladonna deserves major awards consideration A pensive, provocative novel of history, memory, and our endlessly blood-soaked times by one of the foremost writers to have emerged from the former Yugoslavia . . . An elegant novel of ideas concerning decidedly inelegant topics, empathetic but unforgiving. Its own language compelling, open-ended notwithstanding its apocalyptic images, Belladonna resembles a prose Waste Land, an X-ray of our culture, Ban's fragments, like Eliot's, shored against the ruins of our age. Daša Drndic interweaves fiction, reality, history, and memory to terrific effect . . . Drndic attacks history with a novelist's sensibility and has produced a poignant meditation on love and loss, the insanity of war and the legacy of human cruelty.