Love Novel

November 13, 2023
Sajko’s roiling whirlpool of a novel, her first to be translated into English, is a sharp and claustrophobic portrait of a fraying marriage. The husband and wife (an unemployed Dante scholar and a former actor, respectively) have one young child together and struggle to pay for their apartment (the characters and their city are unnamed). Neither are happy. She works a lousy job wearing costumes to promote movies at premieres and goes to an Easter party despite finding Jesus “annoying”; he resolves to leave her, only to stay and try to write a novel. The narrative is circular, always returning to the same unresolved arguments and unvoiced resentments—that is, until their money troubles finally catch up with them and their electricity is shut off. There are plenty of memorable lines (“that was yet another small problem with love, that it lies like a tombstone”) nestled in long paragraphs composed of extended, winding sentences that effectively drill down into the marriage’s corroded underbelly. Sajko never takes her foot off the gas in this potent and incendiary outing.

Starred review from January 1, 2024
In this short novel by award-winning Croatian writer and theater director Sajko, a young couple struggles with parenthood, unemployment, and the anxieties of the historical moment. In an urban apartment complex, a husband and wife are fighting again. He's an unemployed writer and Dante fan, trying to protest government corruption. She's an actress, now home with the baby. "Words, words, words," he screams. She slams a door, waking the child. "There was no one to turn to for help, for support, for some understanding or a grain of optimism, because like they said on the news, and like he always claimed too, it will only get worse..." She's right. Things do get worse. Yet out of this unlikely material, Sajko conjures a brutally honest, richly layered story about the fate of those caught in the inequalities of late capitalism and the inertia of governments. We see the actress "on the verge of a nervous breakdown while she was scraping burnt milk off the bottom of a pot, with the pee-soaked child trying to climb her leg, while she was begging the baby to wait, to wait for just one second, all the while trying with enormous difficulty to refrain from screaming or breaking something, because the child was bawling angrily and slapping at her thigh with tiny hands, demanding the right that every child should be able to claim, not to have to wait, just as he demanded the right that every man should be able to claim to pursue goals more noble than washing the dishes and wiping up urine." Moving deftly between past and present, with evocative sentences that unspool propulsively, Sajko delves into her characters' souls, and the title that seemed initially facetious becomes increasingly apt. Her compassionate attention extends beyond the unhappy couple to a neighbor attempting to grow flowers, a security guard, protestors at a political rally. And the child, absorbing this miasma of vituperation and crushed hopes. A devastating book, humane, original, and deeply relevant.

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