ABOUT
THE BOOK

Love in late capitalism: Ivana Sajko takes us into a war between kitchen and bedroom. He, an unemployed Dante scholar, is trying to change the world and write a novel. She, a passable actress, has given up her safe job at the theatre to care for their child. He is delirious, she is on edge. With the rent overdue and violence looming on all sides, the two of them circle one another in a dizzying dance towards the abyss. ‘A brilliant novel: intense and poetic, exhilarating and devastating.’ Priya Basil.

Comments from the Judges

“He thinks of his wife with the smooth ball under her red coat, throwing away the portable TV she thought was responsible for their communication breakdown. At least that’s how she phrased it. After pointing out that him watching the evening news on three different channels in a row had nothing to do with being better informed and everything to do with wanting to escape from what was going on, mostly from her and the ball under her coat, she’d pulled the cord out of the socket, lifted the set up against her stomach and carried it out.” An actor at what seems to be a dead-end, a frustrated scholar and novelist, and their newly-arrived baby sear every page and every paragraph and every sentence of Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel, translated from the Croatian by Mima Simić. Sajko takes no prisoners in her uncompromising and unrelenting story of what goes on between the unnamed couple in a city where the ‘system’ can grind anyone into a state of despair and panic.
This recklessly intense and yet imaginative novel turns the hard-up couple’s mutual antipathy into an epic series of confrontations. It gloriously marries sociopolitical commentary on failed capitalism in a failed state to the inevitability of failed marriage, locating the narrative in an extraordinary violence of mind and body.
Love Novel goes ruthlessly into how love, be it ever so intense at the beginning—before the novel begins—in fact, disintegrates for this couple. Matching form with content, it depicts lives that involve walking constantly on tightropes with a ferocity of prose that allows no breathing space, consummately conveying the claustrophobic existence of the characters as external as well as personal circumstances close in on them.