Ekaterini: One woman's Balkan Journey

by Marija Knežević

The story of Ekaterni is the story of one woman who lives through the twentieth century in a part of the world where a long life could bear witness to four major wars. Just as there is no such thing as a ’normal life’, so we can understand that one individual story can be the story of a country, of an epoch. The heroine of ’Ekaterni’ is born in the Balkans, and her story is one of human survival, and is therefore universal. This is history seen from the woman’s point of view, the story of the ordinary lives of the women who live through the turbulent historical events of their time. With her own brand of humour, Knezevic wants to parody the traditional biography by demystifying the everyday events in one ’ordinary life’ and let the female narrator tell her side of the story.

Genres: Fiction

168 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Marija Knežević (born 29 December 1963) is a Serbian poet, fiction writer, essayist, literary translator.

Reviews

[Vishy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marija Knežević is a Serbian poet and writer and 'Ekaterini' is the only book of hers which has been translated into English.

This book tells the story of Ekaterini, the title character, and is narrated by Ekaterini's granddaughter. The story starts at around the beginning of the twentieth century and ends at the dawn of the twenty-first. Ekaterini is a greek girl. The story starts when she is young and how during the First World War her family falls into bad times. Ekaterini goes to work and it looks like she might get a measure of independence, but things don't work that way. Soon a young man falls in love with her, and Ekaterini's family likes him, but when they discover that he is not Orthodox Christian but Catholic, they distance themselves from him. When the young man discovers that this is the reason for his proposal being rejected, he feels that this is a minor thing, and he changes his religion and becomes an Orthodox Christian. Ekaterini gets married to him, and later because of another war, she has to move out of Greece and move to Yugoslavia, where her husband is from. The place is new, the people are new, she doesn't know the language. What happens to her as she navigates these big changes in her life, and how it mirrors the history of her adopted country is told in the rest of the story.

I enjoyed reading 'Ekaterini'. How a Greek woman moves to a new country and becomes Yugoslavian is very beautifully told in the book. The story made me think of Miljenko Jergović's 'Kin', because in that book Miljenko Jergović talks about his great grandfather who was German and lived in Bosnia. I also loved the way the book describes how historical happenings impact Ekaterini's life and the life of her children and grandchildren. There are beautiful scenes which describe the relationship between a mother and her daughters and later a grandmother and her granddaughter. It made me smile to read how a woman who was tough on her own daughters, loves her granddaughter unconditionally and inspires her granddaughter to be a free spirit and even encourages rebellion 😊 There is also a beautiful scene which describes a father's love for his daughters which I loved.

Marija Knežević's prose is pleasant to read and there are many beautiful passages. I'm sharing some of them below.

"Lucija adored her father. For her, he was all-powerful and yet tender; he’d sit her on his knee and sing her songs, and he also taught her to read and write. She remembers well the big box he brought home after one of his wholesale shopping days. He put it in the children’s room, called Lucija and Ljubica and, beaming with joy, full of that anticipation which is the greatest pleasure for those who like to please others, watched their astonished reactions when he lifted the lid. The box was full to the top with stationery. The girls were speechless with amazement. They saw all these things for the first time. They didn’t know if they were enchanted by the exercise books, rubbers, pencils and rulers per se, or by the sheer quantity of stationery, which would surely last them into their high-school days."

"Various things can give us a sense of security: family, a beloved being or beings, customs whose repetition is reassuring. Some find calm in a comfortable life with possessions and a full house, others in the opportunity to roam and wander free. Peace can certainly play that role too, in the long or short pauses between wars. As can hard times which could easily have been the end of us, but which we survived, and become the strongest foundations of all to have been invented. They’re like wisdom after a shipwreck for the survivors, in a life which in Serbian we’d call ‘a gift’. For some, it’s enough to hear just one ‘I love you’, se agapo."

"The sun shone in through the freshly cleaned windows and she was delighted with the day’s efforts. As if there was no glass; not a fleck to be seen! But the rays wandered around the room and played with the specks of dust, those irrepressible thousands of particles which eluded both mop and rag. She blew out smoke and began to get annoyed. This blasted dust! You go to so much effort and the room still isn’t immaculate."

"Our first and very major limitation is that we don’t know what it was like to be born. From that very first moment on, we depend on other people’s versions and 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."

"Ekaterini sat peacefully, looking at the potted basil for a while, or the cat slinking around the house, or the kids with beach balls and underwater goggles; she heard their chirpy little voices saying thalassa, the sea, and gazed with the same calm at her toenails as at her memories which rose and ebbed away again like gentle tides. She engaged with every instant of the scenes around her and inside her. She spoke to a butterfly, the dripping tap in the courtyard, aeroplanes in the sky, or Lucija. Once again she was able to hear several voices at the same time – precisely because she didn’t have to. She didn’t have to do anything. There’s no word for that individual feeling of existence in its totality, when you have the good fortune of feeling everything and all at once. Just as living abroad is impossible to explain. Foreigners just hope they will live to experience this some day, and in this way they really reconcile themselves; all their life they reconcile themselves with the truth that home now only exists in their jumbled, nomadic memory: a memory maintained by fantasy – often an outright invention – and succoured by the sweetness of victory greater than that of any battle when we manage to convince friends and family that things were exactly as we said. Nomads live on stories. Only in stories do they feel they exist. Ekaterini was finally able to abandon herself to her senses. And she listened to the language like a cherished melody, near and dear but hummed by someone else."

"I felt immeasurable pain, she – emptiness. The former is bearable but the latter cannot be compensated for, like the deaths of people close to us, which the poet Marina Tsvetayeva speaks of after the poignant word ‘Be!’. When someone dies with whom your life has been fulfilled, she says, you miss them, but they’re still there; they’re not sundered from you because you feel their presence. But when someone dies with whom your life was unfulfilled, there remains only inconsolable sadness."

I'm glad I discovered 'Ekaterini'. Hoping to read more of Marija Knežević's work.

Have you read 'Ekaterini'? What do you think about it?

[Elif · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ekaterini is an exceptional character.

English: https://elifthereader.com/books/ekate...
Türkçe: https://kitaplikkedisi.com/kitaplar/e...

[Tonymess · Rating 4 out of 5]

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);

For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Too many words and emotions to review it now. But definitely worth reading!

[☕Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ratings:

Writing 4
Story line 3
Characters 3
Impact 3

Overall rating 3.25

[Madame A · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit boring to be honest, I had to make myself finish it. I didn't like particularly the main character, and the story was a bit meh.

[Klara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jakie to było przepiękne

[Jai Lau · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reluctant to begin reading due to the pretentious synopsis promising a "human story of an epoch" and "written in homage to the ancient story of Odysseus", the reality of the book is something far simpler and more enjoyable. It is the story of a family tree but mostly influenced by and focused on Ekaterini. Having left her homeland of Thessaloniki to marry a Croatian, Stipe, she lives through his death, raises two daughters and four wars. Living in Belgrade, she never gets to grips with the language nor forget the home that she left behind. Although the story deals with events that are sad, they are told in an almost happy, get-on-with-it way, a lot like Ekaterini herself. Having done what she needed to survive and provide for her family, the peace that she achieves when she finally gets home makes the journey worthwhile. A very well-written book of immigration that captures the scents and tastes of home.