Battle Songs

December 5, 2022
This innovative collection from Drndić (Doppelgänger) was originally published in Croatia in 2019, a year after the author’s death. The five linked stories center on single mother Tea Radan and her daughter, Sara, who leave a crumbling Yugoslavia in the early 1990s for Toronto. Throughout, Drndić juxtaposes seemingly disparate subjects to make emphatic statements about the wartime struggles of Croatians, both refugees in 1990s Canada and those who confronted the Nazis during WWII. In “Little Unfinished Story,” a history of the domestication of pigs is interlaced with refugees’ accounts of their means of survival, such as a classical musician who sells toys door-to-door. In “Hitler Liked Quail and Father Christmas Abandons Bosnia,” Tea works a temp job stuffing envelopes. Here, and elsewhere, the author demonstrates how the characters fill their time with trivial tasks after consequential upheaval. In “Oh, Donna Clara,” Drndić draws a parallel between Sara’s adoption of a cat in Canada and Sara’s aunt Lena adopting a daughter in 1980s Yugoslavia. Though a bit too much genealogical minutiae bogs down the lengthy centerpiece, “Glasshouses and Gallstones,” it otherwise offers an engaging tale of Tea’s struggles in Canada, her ancestors’ interactions with the Ustasha during the 1940s, and the Nazis’ Potemkin village at Terezin. The author’s distinctive style makes these refugee stories sing.

December 1, 2022
A pensive series of joined stories recounting war, exile, and the natural history of pigs. "Vesna told me that someone in a Croatian bank had said that she couldn't understand Serbian at all." So recounts the narrator of Drndić's opening story, a meaningful observation inasmuch as Serbian and Croatian, while mutually intelligible languages, were spoken by implacable enemies during the civil war that broke up Yugoslavia three decades ago. Those differences have many manifestations: As another story recounts in sometimes-cumbersome detail, in different parts of the former nation the raising and consumption of swine take different forms, such that in the western Balkans, "the cult of roast suckling pig did not emit the authenticity so characteristic of their eastern neighbors." Of course, observant Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo eschew pork to begin with, and Croatia "practices Catholicism and chokes on greasy noodles"; what drives former fellow citizens apart are the most minor of variations on food, religion, language, and all the other things of daily life. Those differences also drive many of Drndić's characters into exile in Canada, where they find plenty of reasons to be nostalgic for the old country: "My country is just a sad, hidebound and backward province of European civilization," notes one exile, who adds, "It's better in my country, nevertheless. They don't understand anything here in Canada." In the end, it's enough to make her return to her native land. Drndić's stories are interwoven with memories of the old Yugoslavia, with the red neckerchiefs of young Pioneers and the midnight door-pounding of the secret police, the endless genealogical obsessions that place people in one ethnic camp or another ("There are two branches of my family...both Croatian, so when...blood cells began to be counted, I didn't have a problem") and, in a meaningful passing metaphor, one thing guaranteed to make pigs happy, namely "associating with other pigs." A searching, melancholic study of a time of terror and angst.

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