Umiranje u Torontu

by Daša Drndić

Knjiga je napisana u faction/fiction stilu. u njoj su spojene nove tehnike kreativne samoispovijesti i akutne socijalne percepcije, što daje rijetku dubinu uvida i širinu perspektive o stvarnom, teškom životu novog kanadskog emigranta. Junakinja- pripovjedač je došljakinja u Kanadu koja sa sobom nosi visoko rafinirani, kritički intelekt suvremene Europe.
Drndić analizira naše istinsko ljudsko stanje istančanom senzibilnošću i ironičnom dosjetljivošću. Rezultat je uistinu čitljiva knjiga koja u sebi sadrži u isto vrijeme i vruće i hladno, jer odražava i metaforički prikazuje zbrkane, prozaične, malo priznate kontradikcije mozaik kulture našeg Novog svijeta.
Preispitujući instinkt dobrog građanina ona radi zbrku iz multinacionalnog mita. Usput kreira ništa manje nego portret nove literarne ličnosti - suvremenog intelektualnog izbjeglice - kako bi odredila nacionalni bitak i očistila pseudoetničku savjest. (Ralph Bogart)

Umiranje u Torontu je zapanjujući tekst. U isto vreme lucidan i opor, duhovit i tužan, ali uvek nepomirljiv sa statusom quo, u neprekidnom preispitivanju i borbi za pravdu koja podrazumeva ni manje ni više nego ljudsko dostojanstvo, ono što izbeglicama najpre uzmu. (Vladimir Arsenić)

206 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Daša Drndić (1946-2018) was a distinguished Croatian novelist, playwright and literary critic, author of radio plays and documentaries. She was born in Zagreb, and studied English language and literature at the University of Belgrade. Drndić worked as an editor, a professor of English, and as a TV programme editor in Belgrade. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Rijeka in Croatia, where she later taught. She is the author of thirteen novels including Leica Format (2003), Sonnenschein (2007), Trieste (2011) and Belladonna (2012). Her works have been translated into many languages, and Drndić has won the International Literary Award “Prozart" in 2014, awarded to a prominent author for their contribution towards the development of the literature on the Balkans. Her work has also been shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and the inaugral EBRD Literature Prize.

Reviews

[Uroš Đurković]

Jednostavno je – Daša Drndić zna da piše.

Ne znam da li je iko u književnosti sa ovih prostora sa takvom lakoćom baratao ogromnim dokumentarnim materijalom istovremeno ne gubivši narativnu nit. To nije lako – danas uglavnom citati ne služe piscima, već pisci služe citatima – oni su tu, eto, da bi bili tu. Kod Daše sav taj materijal je svrhovit i dobro osmišljen. Čak je i spisak njenih spiskova uzbudljiv: restorani svrstani u odnosu na njihovu nacionalnu kuhinju, južnoslovenska glasila u Torontu, popis televizijskih vesti jednog nasumičnog dana, spisak (za kanadske uslove) neobičnih dešavanja tokom šetnje gradom, isečci iz novina, niz mogućih briga socijalne radnice, stanovnika zoo-vrta, (uznemirujuće) preporuke Hrvatskog državnog ureda za jezik, kanadske manjine u odnosu na njihova dominantna zanimanja, spisak radnji u šoping molu i zapažanje kako oni nemaju prozore – ništa što ih može otvoriti prema nebu... A ovi spiskovi imaju snažno biografsko uporište – Daša je pisala o sopstvenoj sudbini i sudbini mnogih iseljenika koji su se obreli sredinom devedesetih u Kanadi. To nije vesela priča – ali nikad ne prelazi u samosažaljivost. I ne samo što predstavlja dobro poznato naličje ovih prostora, Daša vešto prikazuje naličje same Kanade – koja se nije pokazala kao najbolji domaćin. Bežeći iz košmara jednog društva na drugi kraj sveta, otkriva se jedno potpuno drukčije društvo kome takođe ne nedostaju problemi. Ali Kanađani ko Kanađani, savršeno fini, svi se svima smeškaju i izvinjavaju, niko nikoga ne prisiljava ni na šta, a pasivna agresija samo mestimično plane u, nimalo zanemarljivu, aktivnu agresiju. Uz to – poznate stvari: stalni umor, karijera, ogromne porcije svega (ogromne i odlično konzervirane – da ne morate nedeljama da kupujete ništa) i sumanuta zamisao „da se novcem može sve nadomijestiti, pa tako i čitav srednji vijek” – što se očitava u poduhvatu iz 1909. da se izgradi u Torontu pravi srednjovekovni zamak! (167) Uz to, veoma je zanimljiv i momenat u kome Daša opisuje tesnu pobedu protivnika nezavisnosti Kvebeka iz 1995. godine, za koju neki političari okrivljuju upravo doseljenike.

Ali da se manem Kanade – sve što su mi pričali o njoj, ispostavilo se kao tačno.

Dugo sam razmišljao kako bi „Umiranje u Torontu” moglo žanrovski da se odredi – iako je naveden kao roman, što je u izvesnom smislu tačno, možda bi tekstu više odgovarala odrednica „reportaža” – izuzetno slojevita, brzočitiljiva reportaža sa mnogobrojnim rukavcima, ličnom vizurom i dobro osmišljenom celinom koja podrazumeva putopisne, autobiografske, esejističke segmente. Čini se da danas samo nešto uzimamo za ozbiljno ako je roman, a roman, kao one predatorske ribe koje ubaciš iz jednog ekosistema u drugi, izjede sve ostale. (Kad sam već kod ekosistema – svakome ko pročita delo neće promaći jedno divno inuitsko predanje, kao i priča o ptici caladrius. Čisto da skrenem pažnju.)

Čitajte Dašu! Zbog njene preciznosti, prodornosti, humora, dara za kombinovanje i posebnog senzibiliteta.

[Paul Fulcher]

'Dying in Toronto' (2026), subtitled 'Or Our Lady of Częstochowa is still shedding tears', is the translation by Celia Hawkesworth of 'Marija Częstohowska još uvijek roni suze ili Umiranje u Torontu' (1997) by Daša Drndić, the subtitle a reference to the Black Madonna of Częstochowa in Poland.

This 2019 LA Review of Books article first alerted me to this, at that point untranslated, work:

The decades of Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia have arguably been the only period of tranquility in the region. When it all fell apart in the ’90s, hundreds of thousands of people emigrated as refugees or migrants for economic and political reasons, as did Ćosić (who appears as a friend in EEG and April in Berlin), Dubravka Ugrešić, David Albahari, and Aleksandar Hemon.

Drndić left too, and settled with her daughter in Toronto, Canada. The book of personal essays Umiranje u Torontu (Croatia 1997; Serbia, 2018) and the more novelistic Canzone di guerra (Meandar, Croatia 1998) cover this period. Toronto also appears in Andreas Ban’s memories. Dying in Toronto chronicles the odd jobs, unemployment, food banks, secondhand clothes, brutal summer and winter temperatures, smog, and the then-still-polluted Lake Ontario. After two years, the narrator and her daughter return to Croatia, where the war has finished.

Dying in Toronto is perhaps best seen as a personal essay, but written with a novelist's flair. As the above suggests it documents Drndić's time in Toronto in 1995-6, a combination of: often somewhat tongue-in-cheek observations on the pecularities of the city; thoughts on the difficulties of life of an exile, and the emigre community; and comments on the situation back in Croatia (Drndić opposing both the Serbian nationalist hostility against Croatia, but also the excesses of the Tuđman regime, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina).

The format distinctively includes both 'breakout' textboxes - rather like a popular business book - with headlines and key observations, and also copious footnotes providing details and references.

Although Drndić has an organising principle, to the reader the text can appear as rather snapshots of life in Toronto, although in a late chapter the author implicitly justifies this in a section on photography which borrows from Susan Sontag (as per the footnote)

Refugees and new arrivals immediately use their first small surplus of cash to buy a camera. As though they were on a tourist trip, those who have been deprived of their home-land, their house, their relatives, their livelihood, their language - click away frenziedly. Making photographs becomes a substitute for the amnesia from which almost all of us suffer. Our amnesia, not at all like that of the elderly, in which events from the past are clearly and sharply etched into the memory, down to the least (and meaningless) details, while more recent events float like islands of white fog, our amnesia enables rebirth. Or, at least, the illusion of rebirth.
Our pasts are clouds, empty spaces filled with dazzling whiteness, through which one sinks into nothingness. People robbed of their past seem to make the most fervent picture takers, at home and abroad. Everyone who lives in an industrialised society is obliged gradually to give up the past.*

In the aspiration that from being a manipulated object, a being that has been ethnically cleansed or humanely displaced, who, in order to eat and copulate, forgets the magical, exciting, reviving act of disobedience, who, like a mole, like a hamster, like a rat, withdraws into the nothingness of his own consciousness and the nightmare of his subconscious, in the aspiration, after flying across the Atlantic, far from historical, political, national imperatives and threats, to restore at least an illusion of his personal transformation into a subject, an active participant in his micro-microdrama - almost every new former-Yugoslav arrival seizes on a camera. For him, photographing things becomes one of the principal devices for experiencing something, for giving an appearance of participation... He becomes active, a voyeur, only he has mastered the situation.

* Extract in italics are based on quotations from Susan Sontag, On Photography, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York 1978.

Overall, one more for Drndić's completists (guilty as charged!) - I think the novel Canzone di guerra is a better treatment of the exile in Toronto, and for a reader new to Daša Drndić start with Trieste, Belladonna and E.E.G. (see bibliography below).

Work by Daša Drndić (1946 – 2018) since the mid 1990s (per Wikipedia)

Marija Częstohowska još uvijek roni suze ili Umiranje u Torontu (1997), translated into English as Dying in Toronto (2026) by Celia Hawkesworth
My review

Canzone di guerra (1998), translated into English as Canzone di Guerra (2022) by Celia Hawkesworth
My review

Totenwande (2000), as yet untranslated

Doppelgänger (2002), translated into English as Doppelgänger ( 2018) by Celia Hawkesworth and SD Curtis
My review
Shortlisted for 2019 Republic of Consciousness Prize

Leica Format (2003), translated into English as Leica Format (2015) by Celia Hawkesworth
My review

Sonnenschein (2007), translated into English as Trieste (2012) by Ellen Elias-Bursać
My review
Shortlisted for 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

April u Berlinu (2009), as yet untranslated

Belladonna (2012), translated into English as Belladonna 2017, by Celia Hawkesworth
My review
Winner 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Prize and shortlisted for the 2018 EBRD Literature Prize and 2018 Oxford Weidenfeld Prize

E.E.G (2016), translated into English as E.E.G. (2018), by Celia Hawkesworth
My review

[Joseph Schreiber]

This book may be considered as the non-fiction counterpart to "Canzone di Guerra" or "Battle Songs" which was released in English in 2022. Both books were originally published in Croatian in the mid-1990s and deal with the experience of living as an immigrant in Canada in 1995–1996. Here Drndić addresses her situation as a single mother with a thirteen year-old daughter, and the experiences of her friends, in a more direct manner. Her tone is often tinged with a bitter sarcasm. As a Canadian, both works hit close to home, but to read this one now, when general negativity toward migrants is heightened and separatist sentiments are running high in Quebec (their last referendum occurred during Drndic's time in Canada) and in Alberta where I live. As well, to read of the experiences of well-educated migrants with no hope of working in their professions, those who have come to escape war and economic decline in their homelands, is always a critical reminder of the view from the other side. It is not new, of course, but the polarization and anti-immigrant perspectives are escalating throughout the western world.
Along with personal stories and anecdotes, Drndić also engages in diversions into the history of Toronto, the Inuit, and the fates of her daughter's many pets. I enjoyed this book a lot, and I suspect Canadians will find it especially timely (even if she is not always kind to us).

More to come.

[Olivera Vukašinović]

Prvi put sam se s ovom autorkom susrela čitajući reizdanje romana iz 2018. godine kod Partizanske knjige, koji je prvi put objavljen 1997. godine pod naslovom »Marija Czestochowska još uvijek roni suze ili Umiranje u Torontu«

Tema ovog dela, kao i mnogih drugih Daše Drndić su one manje vidljive strahote rata, prikazane kroz lične priče imigranata u kojima, kroz iskustva fikcionih likova, ali i u autobiografskim opisima, autorka prati put koji je i sama prošla u Torontu krajem devedesetih godina.

Posebno interesantan jeste spoj fikcionalnog i dokumentarnog. Daša prikazuje kataloge: filmova koji su se prikazivali u Torontu te godine, daje spiskove časopisa i emigrantskih organizacija iz Hrvatske i Srbije u Kanadi, izdvaja isečke iz novina i delove svakodnevnih vesti s televizije. Sve te informacije daju poseban šmek realnosti i stvarnosti ovom delu.

S vremenskom razlikom od gotovo dvadeset godina od prvog izdanja iskustva Toronta su i dalje sveža i aktuelna i primenjiva na svaki imigrantski život.

Vedrana Rudan je izjavila povodom knjige: “Ova knjiga je pjesma u prozi za sva vremena”, dodavši da ona Dašu Drndić doživljava kao veliku belu lavicu – veličanstvenu i izuzetno retku.

Knjiga je napisana u ispovednom stilu, intelektualnom stilu. Primetna je duboka socijalna percepcija, što daje dubinu uvida i širinu perspektive o stvarnom, teškom životu novog kanadskog emigranta. Junakinja- pripivedač je došljakinja u Kanadu koja sa sobom nosi visoko rafinirani, kritički intelekt savremene Evrope. Daša analizira naše istinsko ljudsko stanje istančanom senzibilnošću i ironičnom dosetljivošću. Usput kreirajući portret nove literarne ličnosti - savremenog intelektualnog izbeglice - ne samo pisca, već i slikara, muzičara i čitave revije ličnosti koje šetaju stranicama njene knjige.

I sama sam upoznala više nosilaca sličnih sudbina ovde u Amsterdamu. Sada već dugogodišnjih Holanđana. Ljudi koji imaju drugačiju percepciju i dubinu doživljaja emigracije od nas. Jer oni egzil nisu izabrali svojevoljno, već bežeći od rata i spašavajući živu glavu.

Daša nije umrla u Torontu, već u svojoj Rijeci...

[Marko Marić]

Za mene je ova knjiga bila posebno značajna jer govori o izbegličkom iskustvu naših ljudi u Kanadi. Dete sam dvoje ljudi koji su prošli kroz to iskustvo. Ovaj roman je kritika savremenog društva, kritika rata, kapitalizma, koncepta Kanade, koncepta posleratne Hrvatske. Savršeno opisuje društveni položaj osobe koja ne pripada “ni vamo ni tamo”, nekoga ko se ne snalazi i ne pronalazi u novonastalim okolnostima. Ispada da je bilo lakše otići daleko i krenuti ispočetka, ali ni tamo nije lako. Postavlja se samo pitanje koja je od te dve muke lakša čoveku, iako nisu za poređenje, jer su potpuno različite prirode. Dilema ostati ili otići aktuelna je i danas, gotovo 30 godina kasnije. Nažalost, još uvek ne postoji apsolutno bolja opcija.

[Sara G]

Ova mi je knjiga bila izuzetno interesantna, mada nisam sigurna da mi je Dašin stil legao. Cela knjiga je bila nekako mrzovoljna i teška, kao kad slušate nekoga kako pasivno-agresivno gunđa. Mislim da vredi pročitati je, jer oslikava jedno veoma specifično emigrantsko iskustvo i stanje života u tuđini na razumljiv, polu fiktivan polu činjeničan način, vrlo mi je drago da sam je kupila (i pročitala). Ipak, ne mislim da ću čitati druge knjige Daše Drndić.

[Marina Horvat]

Jednostavno fantastična knjiga.