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EEG
Andreas Ban failed in his suicide attempt. Even as his body falters and his lungs constrict, he taps on the glass of history – an impenetrable case filled with silent figures – and tries to summon those imprisoned within. Mercilessly, fearlessly, he continues to dissect society and his environment, shunning all favours as he goes after the evils and hidden secrets of others. History remembers the names of perpetrators, not of the victims.
Ban travels from Rijeka to Rovinj in nearby Istria, from Belgrade to Toronto to Tirana, from Parisian avenues to Italian palazzi. Ghosts follow him wherever he goes: chess grandmasters who disappeared during WWII; the lost inhabitants of Latvia; war criminals who found work in the C.I.A. and died peacefully in their beds. Ban’s family is with him too: those he has lost and those with one foot in the grave. As if left with only a few pieces in a chess game, Andreas Ban plays a stunning last match against Death.
Ban travels from Rijeka to Rovinj in nearby Istria, from Belgrade to Toronto to Tirana, from Parisian avenues to Italian palazzi. Ghosts follow him wherever he goes: chess grandmasters who disappeared during WWII; the lost inhabitants of Latvia; war criminals who found work in the C.I.A. and died peacefully in their beds. Ban’s family is with him too: those he has lost and those with one foot in the grave. As if left with only a few pieces in a chess game, Andreas Ban plays a stunning last match against Death.
412 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2016
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1923 people want to read
About the author
Daša Drndić
24 books144 followersDaša 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
May 29, 2020
Winner of the 2020 Best Translated Book Award.
"Which would further upset its blinded readers (and critics) who look for a cemented form of regular shapes, harmonious outlines, a form filled with a cascade of connected words, of which it would be possible to say that its characters are nuanced, the relationships, emotions and reflections distinctive, and the style polished; that the ease of narration comes to full expression (whatever that means), that the characters are alive (!), and convincing and remind us of people that we know (?!), we feel close to their doubts, their fears, their expectations and disappointments. What vacuity."
Croatian writer Daša Drndić, who died in June 2018, was best known until recently in the English-speaking world for her 2007 novel, translated into English as Trieste (2012) by Ellen Elias-Bursać. But she achieved greater, and deserved, prominence, with the 2017 translation by Celia Hawkesworth of her 2012 novel, Belladonna (my review). Hawkesworth's translation won the 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 EBRD Literature Prize and 2018 Oxford Weidenfeld Prize, although rather oddly overlooked for the Man Booker International (I suspect a late publication date in the MBI cycle may have been a factor).
2018 saw two further translations appear: this, E.E.G., by Celia Hawkesworth from Drndić's 2016 original, her last novel, and an earlier (2002) and rather different work, Doppelgänger translated into English by Celia Hawkesworth and Susan Curtis, recently and deservedly longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
EEG is essentially a sequel to Belladonna and also narrated by psychologist Andreas Ban, who functions in many respects as Drndić's alter ego. When we left him in Belladonna he was contemplating suicide and the last chapter of that novel suggested he may have carried this through. But EEG has an epigraph from EM Cioran (from his Cahiers 1957-1962):
Of course I didn't kill myself
One of Drndić's hallmarks, in Trieste and Belladonna particularly, is the Sebaldian use of photographs and archival material. In EEG these still figure, but to a lesser extent - as she told the Paris Review in 2017, referring to this novel:
Lists, particularly when they are read aloud, become salvos, each name a shot, the air trembles and shakes with the gunfire. Lists of the dead – the murdered – are direct and threatening. They beat out a staccato rhythm like a march, out of them speak the dead, saying Look at us. They offer us their short lives, their faces, their passions and fears, the rooms in which they dreamed, the streets they loved, their clothes, their books, their medical records. But, we have our own dreams and our own faintheartedness and a new age, we don’t have time to concern ourselves with the dead/murdered. Chess, a game of liquidation, chess-playing liquidators, what irony.
The holocaust – in addition to the chess players who stand behind me as I play with Ada, who whisper to me not that one, not that move, others too surge into our gloomy Rovinj space, from everywhere, from Poland, from Austria, from Czechoslovakia, from Hungary, from Ukraine and Belarus, and after them come those from Stalin’s U.S.S.R., oh yes, and then there’s a crowd, we’re surrounded by statues, granite effigies with living eyes. Those eyes are dry and their gaze is hard, we are surrounded by monuments with lips that move, from which a threatening soundlessness falls like a breeze onto our stone floor. Then there is not enough air. And the light is extinguished.
Here, some chess players, victims of Nazism:
Leon Kremer (1901–40)
Jakub Kolski (1900–41)
Yakov Vilner (1899–1941)
Abram Szpiro (1910–41)
Leon Schwarzman (1887–1942)
Emil Zinner (1873–1942)
Henryk Friedman (1903–43)
Henryk Pogoriely (1908–43)
Eduard Gerstenfeld (1915–43)
Heinrich Wolf (1875–1943)
Léon Monosson (1892–1943)
Wilhelm Orbach (1894–1944)
Endre Steiner (1901–44)
Izidor Gross, Kislod, Hungary, b. 25 June, 1860, d. transit camp Jasenovac, 1942, the Croatian chess Grandmaster and cantor of the Jewish community in Karlovac.
(from https://granta.com/e-e-g/)
Drndić / Ban also pushes back forcefully against the trend to auto-fiction, critiquing not so much those who write the books as those who read them.
I’m not offering ‘a story’, because I write about people who don’t have ‘a story’, not about those or for those who are looking for other people’s stories in order to find their own in them.
...
Autobiographical books don't exist, autobiographies don't exist, there are multigraphies, biographical mixes, biographical cocktails, the whole mélangeof a life through which we dig, which we clear out, from which we select fragments, little pieces that we stuff into our pockets, little mouthfuls that we swallow as though they were our own.
Indeed specific reference is made to Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle books which are absolutely intolerable unless the person reading them is inwardly riddled with holes, full of stale air, so the cultivation of perverse voyeuristic instincts serves to fill up that inner void.
Somehow, 6 pages later, Ban has segued into proclaiming his dislike of broccoli and beetroot and this digressionary style is characteristic of the novel - perhaps more so in EEG than Belladonna.
Ban's description of his grandmother's stories could, now he too is towards the end of his life, equally describe his own:
Bit by bit, it was quite unclear why or because of what, days, nights, years would come into Ana's stories, with no connection to her or my reality at the time, with no stimulus or obvious, at least to me, associations, as though within the walls of her skull parallel tales were spinning, detached stories knitted into balls of history, that floated through cosmic, timeless times, colliding occassionally with a bang, at others remaining locked in an undefined embrace of suffering, longing, loss, anger, caprice and emotions.
Indeed at one point, in this very self-aware novel, Ban suggests a new physical format that would suit his novel, one I could imagine that B.S. Johnson might actually have pursued:
This digressionary little tale (like the other stories that fall out of the frame and upset or break the so-called "uniform flow of narration") ought to lie in a real little envelope stuck where the tale is inserted. Then whoever holds the book in his hands could take the little tale out and read it (with the aid of a cheap plastic magnifying glass attached to the book, because the little tale would be printed in tiny letters, because of its alleged insignificance), and if he doesn't wish to -- so what ? The reader could take all the parenthetic fabrications scattered within the covers of this book and move them from one miniature envelope into another or simply throw them away and so alter the content, create the “story” he wishes, a course of events which would flow harmoniously and rationally, in compositional and literary terms correctly, or he could do nothing: stick the little envelopes down, seal them. But, no one wants to make such a "design," no publisher, no printer, because it's expensive and considered absurd.
This is a novel stepped in 20th century European literature - at one point something is described as Proustian and Bernhardian, even Krležian (the last a reference to Miroslav Krleža). Other key references include Hamsun, Walser, Broch, Kis, Gombrowicz, Cioran, Pessoa, Zweig and Joseph Roth, and indeed even Daša Drndić herself as Ban refers to his previous adventures with D.D. and characters from Trieste and Leica format wander on to the page. But the key note is above all, the incomparable Thomas Bernhard. As she stated in an interview in 2017:
Overall, as with Belladonna not an easy nor pleasant read, but a crucial voice and Drndić's passing leaves a large hole in European literature.
"Which would further upset its blinded readers (and critics) who look for a cemented form of regular shapes, harmonious outlines, a form filled with a cascade of connected words, of which it would be possible to say that its characters are nuanced, the relationships, emotions and reflections distinctive, and the style polished; that the ease of narration comes to full expression (whatever that means), that the characters are alive (!), and convincing and remind us of people that we know (?!), we feel close to their doubts, their fears, their expectations and disappointments. What vacuity."
Croatian writer Daša Drndić, who died in June 2018, was best known until recently in the English-speaking world for her 2007 novel, translated into English as Trieste (2012) by Ellen Elias-Bursać. But she achieved greater, and deserved, prominence, with the 2017 translation by Celia Hawkesworth of her 2012 novel, Belladonna (my review). Hawkesworth's translation won the 2018 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 EBRD Literature Prize and 2018 Oxford Weidenfeld Prize, although rather oddly overlooked for the Man Booker International (I suspect a late publication date in the MBI cycle may have been a factor).
2018 saw two further translations appear: this, E.E.G., by Celia Hawkesworth from Drndić's 2016 original, her last novel, and an earlier (2002) and rather different work, Doppelgänger translated into English by Celia Hawkesworth and Susan Curtis, recently and deservedly longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize (my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)
EEG is essentially a sequel to Belladonna and also narrated by psychologist Andreas Ban, who functions in many respects as Drndić's alter ego. When we left him in Belladonna he was contemplating suicide and the last chapter of that novel suggested he may have carried this through. But EEG has an epigraph from EM Cioran (from his Cahiers 1957-1962):
What saved me was considering suicide. Had I not considered suicide, I would certainly killed myself. The desire to die is my one and only concern; I have sacrificed everything to it, even death.And EEG begins with the rather scornful words from Ban:
Of course I didn't kill myself
One of Drndić's hallmarks, in Trieste and Belladonna particularly, is the Sebaldian use of photographs and archival material. In EEG these still figure, but to a lesser extent - as she told the Paris Review in 2017, referring to this novel:
Language has turned into tweeting, ideas are blogged, so, accordingly, the process of thinking has become shamefully simplified. But I’ve decided to give up. In my latest book, there are few photographs and hardly any documents. The word is there to fight for its rite of passage.Another, related technique, is the use of lists to hammer home the true horror of atrocities, for example in Belladonna all 2,061 children deported from the Netherlands to concentration camps in 1938-1945. From the same interview:
if football—soccer—fanatics can memorize teams of players through time, it is polite at least to scan through a list of victims for whose destinies all of us bear responsibility.Again the technique is used a little less - at various times Ban tells us he could list things but won't. Nevertheless, lists there are: in EEG Ban focuses on how chess players were caught up in both the Nazi holocaust but also Soviet oppression (abstract problem solving being regarded as 'decadent'), as well as those chess players who aided and abetted the oppression of their peers:
Lists, particularly when they are read aloud, become salvos, each name a shot, the air trembles and shakes with the gunfire. Lists of the dead – the murdered – are direct and threatening. They beat out a staccato rhythm like a march, out of them speak the dead, saying Look at us. They offer us their short lives, their faces, their passions and fears, the rooms in which they dreamed, the streets they loved, their clothes, their books, their medical records. But, we have our own dreams and our own faintheartedness and a new age, we don’t have time to concern ourselves with the dead/murdered. Chess, a game of liquidation, chess-playing liquidators, what irony.
The holocaust – in addition to the chess players who stand behind me as I play with Ada, who whisper to me not that one, not that move, others too surge into our gloomy Rovinj space, from everywhere, from Poland, from Austria, from Czechoslovakia, from Hungary, from Ukraine and Belarus, and after them come those from Stalin’s U.S.S.R., oh yes, and then there’s a crowd, we’re surrounded by statues, granite effigies with living eyes. Those eyes are dry and their gaze is hard, we are surrounded by monuments with lips that move, from which a threatening soundlessness falls like a breeze onto our stone floor. Then there is not enough air. And the light is extinguished.
Here, some chess players, victims of Nazism:
Leon Kremer (1901–40)
Jakub Kolski (1900–41)
Yakov Vilner (1899–1941)
Abram Szpiro (1910–41)
Leon Schwarzman (1887–1942)
Emil Zinner (1873–1942)
Henryk Friedman (1903–43)
Henryk Pogoriely (1908–43)
Eduard Gerstenfeld (1915–43)
Heinrich Wolf (1875–1943)
Léon Monosson (1892–1943)
Wilhelm Orbach (1894–1944)
Endre Steiner (1901–44)
Izidor Gross, Kislod, Hungary, b. 25 June, 1860, d. transit camp Jasenovac, 1942, the Croatian chess Grandmaster and cantor of the Jewish community in Karlovac.
(from https://granta.com/e-e-g/)
Drndić / Ban also pushes back forcefully against the trend to auto-fiction, critiquing not so much those who write the books as those who read them.
I’m not offering ‘a story’, because I write about people who don’t have ‘a story’, not about those or for those who are looking for other people’s stories in order to find their own in them.
...
Autobiographical books don't exist, autobiographies don't exist, there are multigraphies, biographical mixes, biographical cocktails, the whole mélangeof a life through which we dig, which we clear out, from which we select fragments, little pieces that we stuff into our pockets, little mouthfuls that we swallow as though they were our own.
Indeed specific reference is made to Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle books which are absolutely intolerable unless the person reading them is inwardly riddled with holes, full of stale air, so the cultivation of perverse voyeuristic instincts serves to fill up that inner void.
Somehow, 6 pages later, Ban has segued into proclaiming his dislike of broccoli and beetroot and this digressionary style is characteristic of the novel - perhaps more so in EEG than Belladonna.
Ban's description of his grandmother's stories could, now he too is towards the end of his life, equally describe his own:
Bit by bit, it was quite unclear why or because of what, days, nights, years would come into Ana's stories, with no connection to her or my reality at the time, with no stimulus or obvious, at least to me, associations, as though within the walls of her skull parallel tales were spinning, detached stories knitted into balls of history, that floated through cosmic, timeless times, colliding occassionally with a bang, at others remaining locked in an undefined embrace of suffering, longing, loss, anger, caprice and emotions.
Indeed at one point, in this very self-aware novel, Ban suggests a new physical format that would suit his novel, one I could imagine that B.S. Johnson might actually have pursued:
This digressionary little tale (like the other stories that fall out of the frame and upset or break the so-called "uniform flow of narration") ought to lie in a real little envelope stuck where the tale is inserted. Then whoever holds the book in his hands could take the little tale out and read it (with the aid of a cheap plastic magnifying glass attached to the book, because the little tale would be printed in tiny letters, because of its alleged insignificance), and if he doesn't wish to -- so what ? The reader could take all the parenthetic fabrications scattered within the covers of this book and move them from one miniature envelope into another or simply throw them away and so alter the content, create the “story” he wishes, a course of events which would flow harmoniously and rationally, in compositional and literary terms correctly, or he could do nothing: stick the little envelopes down, seal them. But, no one wants to make such a "design," no publisher, no printer, because it's expensive and considered absurd.
This is a novel stepped in 20th century European literature - at one point something is described as Proustian and Bernhardian, even Krležian (the last a reference to Miroslav Krleža). Other key references include Hamsun, Walser, Broch, Kis, Gombrowicz, Cioran, Pessoa, Zweig and Joseph Roth, and indeed even Daša Drndić herself as Ban refers to his previous adventures with D.D. and characters from Trieste and Leica format wander on to the page. But the key note is above all, the incomparable Thomas Bernhard. As she stated in an interview in 2017:
What comes to mind immediately is Thomas Bernhard, because he gave me the courage, I saw that you can be angry, you don’t have to be polite, you can be nasty, you can criticize. And while reading him I was so happy that I had the right to be angry: with my country, with politics. Because during this old system I was just thinking now: you could talk softly against your country and the party at home. When you went abroad that was sort of forbidden. You weren’t supposed to criticize your country and also it was also preferable to drop by the embassy or the consulate and tell them you were there. And Bernhard said, when I read his first book translated into Serbian, it was „Frost” I think, some thirty years ago, then they discovered him in Croatia, so, when I first read him I thought: „This is wonderful, you can be angry, you can curse, you can really say what you think if you really know how to say it"But whereas Bernhard's anger and his novels were tightly controlled, that of Drndić (via Ban) unapologetically spills is all directions - as the quote that opens my review suggests, neatness is the opposite of what Drndić aims for.
Overall, as with Belladonna not an easy nor pleasant read, but a crucial voice and Drndić's passing leaves a large hole in European literature.
February 10, 2025
This is as close as I've seen to 2666 in terms of grandiose masterwork written at death's door that tries to sum up the twentieth century in all its joy and horror, though a little more grounded in a single narrative vision. If anything it feels even sadder, and instead of one centralized abyss, it is the abyss of everywhere, from America to Europe, from one building to the next, from you to the person next to you on the metro disintegrating in their seat. A great novel of digressions, from chess masters (nazi, soviet, or those killed by the nazis and soviets), to Yugoslavian anarchist anti-fascist football clubs, to a long list of property stolen by the Nazis that circulates still in the flea markets of Europe, to the stocktaking of dreams of those confined to a single asylum in Croatia, EEG doesn't let up. Unlike 2666, very little happens at the surface level of characters and their movement, but goddamn in what a way! It is concerned instead with the shifting always at the surface of reality, of the change of national borders, identity, revisionist historical remembrance—the ever present past in contemporaneousness, of our refusal to interrogate the depths we traipse over daily to get a coffee, of the delicate tension that holds together the illusion of a no-strings-attached now, the sheer stupidity of such a veneer of respectability. It is by turns harsh and sentimental, ruthlessly probing and willing to entertain childhood reminiscence, regionally specific to provincial cities and internationally informed, but most of all, it is a book to be experienced, and probably will be one of the best of 2019. A shame only that it's Drndić's last.
May 20, 2019
The textbook definition of “sprawling”, Croatian novelist Daša Drndić’s swansong is a monumental novel mixing travelogue, impassioned testaments to the war dead, genealogical evacuation (filtered through a male narrator, for an unknown reason), charming snark, and metatextual cribbing and hat-tipping. Over 400 pages, Drndić rambles across Europe, unable to escape the ghosts of the Croatian massacred, and the lack of reparation for the victims, moments woven around digressions on mental illness, suicidal chess players, modernist authors, and the autobiographical snippets of friends and family, including her (his?) formidable Grandma Ana. Channelling the lyricism of Sebald, the sardonic humour of Ugrešić, and the rage of Bernhard, Drndić is a compelling and inflammatory novelist, translated with panache by the redoubtable Celia Hawkesworth.
April 11, 2020
This is the last novel that Daša Drndić published before tragically succumbing to cancer in 2018, and it is my first encounter with her work. Free from the rigid formulas of novelistic structure, EEG blends several genres, the kind of writing I love when done well and, in this case, it’s so exceptional that it should serve as a prime example of its kind.
It’s narrated in the first person by the fictional character Andreas Ban who shares with Drndić similar and sometimes identical biographical details, although, in her interviews, she was distancing herself from labeling Andreas as her “alter ego.” Through his ruminations she explores the dark side of modern history in connection to the present circumstances with beautifully narrated episodes from Ban’s family history, brief biographies of actual figures from the past, historical facts as well as vignettes with invented plot stories, the arch of all of which is in exposing fascism and totalitarianism in modern times. Given Drndić’s origin and life (born in Croatia, lived for 40 years in Belgrade in Serbia, spent the remaining 25 years of her life in Istria’s portion of Croatia) as well as the mostly Central European literary influences she enthusiastically acknowledges (Thomas Bernhard, Danilo Kiš, Kafka, Gombrowitz, and similar), the events take place in various regions of Central and Eastern Europe, although Paris is also importantly featured.
The fascist perpetrators are fully unmasked, their forgotten victims are duly recognized, the (willing) collective amnesia is wholly exposed in both the darkest times of the Holocaust and the contemporary rise of neofascism and ultra-nationalism. It was revelatory, emotionally overwhelming, and awe-inspiring to read such a remarkable literary talent who writes with the crushing honesty and courageous integrity of a deeply humane person. The world has lost a great writer and humanist.
The translation is also absolutely brilliant. Celia Hawkesworth is an extraordinary translator from Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian), specializing in the only Nobel laureate from the former Yugoslavia Ivo Andrić, but who also fortunately translated several of Drndić’s novels. That said, Daša Drndić herself had an extraordinary command of the English language and personally worked with Hawkesworth through the final drafts to express correctly all the nuances of the original. Nothing is amiss in this translation and, by all accounts, it reads as the original.
Daša Drndić (1946-2018), a great writer and humanist
It’s narrated in the first person by the fictional character Andreas Ban who shares with Drndić similar and sometimes identical biographical details, although, in her interviews, she was distancing herself from labeling Andreas as her “alter ego.” Through his ruminations she explores the dark side of modern history in connection to the present circumstances with beautifully narrated episodes from Ban’s family history, brief biographies of actual figures from the past, historical facts as well as vignettes with invented plot stories, the arch of all of which is in exposing fascism and totalitarianism in modern times. Given Drndić’s origin and life (born in Croatia, lived for 40 years in Belgrade in Serbia, spent the remaining 25 years of her life in Istria’s portion of Croatia) as well as the mostly Central European literary influences she enthusiastically acknowledges (Thomas Bernhard, Danilo Kiš, Kafka, Gombrowitz, and similar), the events take place in various regions of Central and Eastern Europe, although Paris is also importantly featured.
The fascist perpetrators are fully unmasked, their forgotten victims are duly recognized, the (willing) collective amnesia is wholly exposed in both the darkest times of the Holocaust and the contemporary rise of neofascism and ultra-nationalism. It was revelatory, emotionally overwhelming, and awe-inspiring to read such a remarkable literary talent who writes with the crushing honesty and courageous integrity of a deeply humane person. The world has lost a great writer and humanist.
The translation is also absolutely brilliant. Celia Hawkesworth is an extraordinary translator from Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian), specializing in the only Nobel laureate from the former Yugoslavia Ivo Andrić, but who also fortunately translated several of Drndić’s novels. That said, Daša Drndić herself had an extraordinary command of the English language and personally worked with Hawkesworth through the final drafts to express correctly all the nuances of the original. Nothing is amiss in this translation and, by all accounts, it reads as the original.
Daša Drndić (1946-2018), a great writer and humanist
October 6, 2020
This was the late Daša Drndić's final book, and is effectively a continuation of Belladonna, told by the same narrator Andreas Ban, and it is also stylistically similar to her earlier Trieste. Once again, the narrator is a bit part player, and most of the book ranges over the troubled history of twentieth century Europe, and as always the details are revelatory - for example the list of chess players and their troubled demises.
This time round much of the history concerns Latvia, and the role of Latvians in Nazi atrocities. One of Andreas Ban's uncles had an affair with a Jewish Latvian violinist who he met in Paris before the war, and one of Andreas's former lover turns out to be the daughter of one of these Latvian war criminals.
Eventually the focus returns to the Ban family, and the story of his father's last days.
Another very impressive book, and a fitting note on which to bow out.
This time round much of the history concerns Latvia, and the role of Latvians in Nazi atrocities. One of Andreas Ban's uncles had an affair with a Jewish Latvian violinist who he met in Paris before the war, and one of Andreas's former lover turns out to be the daughter of one of these Latvian war criminals.
Eventually the focus returns to the Ban family, and the story of his father's last days.
Another very impressive book, and a fitting note on which to bow out.
June 8, 2022
"Memory and space are in a permanent clinch; when space collapses, it drags memory into its underground, into its nonexistence, and without memory, the present becomes sick, mutilated, a torso with extracted organs."
This is the second Drndić book I've read and I'm struck by how forceful her prose is and how relentless her push to "bear witness" feels. Her characters are depressed in the present and outraged over history. They don't just want you to remember the victims of history, they want you to share their outrage. And she so effortlessly ties the past to the present while reminding us just how dangerous it can and will be should we forget and let our guards down. Drndić weaves together anecdote and historical documents (everything from family photos to archived tabular listing of items stolen from the Jews during WWII); she bounces between the individual and personal to the collective and public. It's like history and survival itself are a game of chess in which we're forced to play and will likely go insane in the process.
I was reminded of a brief story my late father-in-law told me: He lived in Lithuania during WWII before his family fled to America. He didn't talk too much about the past, but we were visiting for lunch one day when my son was 8 years old. He said, "I had a girlfriend in third grade, but it only lasted one day." We asked what happened on the next day after he had asked her out. He simply said, "The Russians invaded."
-------------------------------------
WORDS/PHRASES/NAMES/EVENTS/WORKS I STILL WANT TO EXPLORE
turbofolk music | nostrification | Kata Bolf | NKVD | the French “legion of death” | Chigorin | Roas von Praunheim | grandomania | Guy Ropartz sonata n.2 for violin in E major | Hawks of the Daugava | Borislav Pekić’s Arsenije Njegovan | autotrophic | Stefan Zweig | Tina Modotti | Vlado Zristl | epigones | Gombrowicz’s Operetta
June 3, 2025
There’s a density, unpredictability, and depth to this book I’ve not come across in anyone other than Bolaño. Digressions and vignettes abound, so do long sections about fascism, Nazis, and stories of 20th century war crimes throughout Europe. What’s most surprising about this book, though, is the narrator, who is funny and self-aware and not afraid of anything. This makes what should feel like a long, dense read something that’s constantly enjoyable, even on the sentence and paragraph level.
I’m not sure what this book is about, honestly. It’s one of those that seems to be about everything, including the nature of evil, but it does seem interested in the personal act of remembering as a social good, and the power of literature to preserve something which would otherwise be forgotten.
A true masterpiece, a book to come back to again and again
I’m not sure what this book is about, honestly. It’s one of those that seems to be about everything, including the nature of evil, but it does seem interested in the personal act of remembering as a social good, and the power of literature to preserve something which would otherwise be forgotten.
A true masterpiece, a book to come back to again and again
May 1, 2018
U romanu su nelinearno povezani različiti događaji, priče, tabele, fakti, citati, sećanja i fotografije. Ta zbrka je katkad zanimljiva, a katkad veoma naporna. Imao sam utisak da slušam isposvest starca naloženog na svoj životopis. Taj starac je ponešto video, nešto proživeo, negde proputovao, a ni na koji način ne zna da odvoji važno od nevažnog, dakle nema nimalo obzira prema svom sagovorniku.
Ne pamtim da me je u poslednje vreme neki protagonista nervirao kao Andreas Ban, jer na takvog snoba odavno nisam naišao u književnosti. Jezički sitničavac, smarač, šokiran što ljudi u Hrvatskoj ništa ne znaju o Filipinima, grozi se folka, prezire Knausgora, čudi se kako ljudi mogu da ga čitaju. Ipak, za razliku od Banove, Knausgorova priča vrvi od života i od iskrenosti i upravo je zato tako voljena.
Kada se izruguje folku, Ban to ne čini citirajući neki mejnstrim folk, već ekstreme - "Jedva čekam da saranim majku, pa u kuću da dovedem Rajku". Ko to sluša, gde to postoji? Ovakav izbor najlakše mete dovodi nas do toga da je inicijalna želja za izrugivanje kiču pretvorena u kič sam po sebi. Tačno mogu da zamislim autorku koja je, navodeći besmislene stihove, zamišljala ljude slične sebi kako čitaju te redove, hvataju se za glavu i uzdišu u neverici.
Političke opservacije, kao i one iz bliske istorije, potpuno su na mestu. Sve bih mogao da potpišem. Ipak, kada bi mi neko ponudio neki drugi roman Daše Drndić, nisam siguran da bih ga uzeo.
Ne pamtim da me je u poslednje vreme neki protagonista nervirao kao Andreas Ban, jer na takvog snoba odavno nisam naišao u književnosti. Jezički sitničavac, smarač, šokiran što ljudi u Hrvatskoj ništa ne znaju o Filipinima, grozi se folka, prezire Knausgora, čudi se kako ljudi mogu da ga čitaju. Ipak, za razliku od Banove, Knausgorova priča vrvi od života i od iskrenosti i upravo je zato tako voljena.
Kada se izruguje folku, Ban to ne čini citirajući neki mejnstrim folk, već ekstreme - "Jedva čekam da saranim majku, pa u kuću da dovedem Rajku". Ko to sluša, gde to postoji? Ovakav izbor najlakše mete dovodi nas do toga da je inicijalna želja za izrugivanje kiču pretvorena u kič sam po sebi. Tačno mogu da zamislim autorku koja je, navodeći besmislene stihove, zamišljala ljude slične sebi kako čitaju te redove, hvataju se za glavu i uzdišu u neverici.
Političke opservacije, kao i one iz bliske istorije, potpuno su na mestu. Sve bih mogao da potpišem. Ipak, kada bi mi neko ponudio neki drugi roman Daše Drndić, nisam siguran da bih ga uzeo.
September 12, 2019
How is it that I had never read Daša Drndić? Drndić (1946–2018) is one of Croatia’s most acclaimed contemporary authors and a very respected European author.
Drndić said of her writing: “I use fiction and faction – transcripts, photographs, documents and I twist them. I enjoy myself, twisting these realities.”
E.E.G. is harrowingly elegiac and presents the 20th century "as a parade of horrors". It is the last book she published before her death in June 2018. I wish I'd met her.
This is one of my highlights of the year.
Drndić said of her writing: “I use fiction and faction – transcripts, photographs, documents and I twist them. I enjoy myself, twisting these realities.”
E.E.G. is harrowingly elegiac and presents the 20th century "as a parade of horrors". It is the last book she published before her death in June 2018. I wish I'd met her.
This is one of my highlights of the year.
April 3, 2022
My first novel by Dasa Drndic and one that makes me feel her passing as a huge loss. This brilliant novel narrated by Andreas Ban, a writer, who I’ve been told is a kind of alter ego for Drndic herself, is a partial history of his life but also a discussion of Chess players and the number of them that have committed suicide, Nazi crimes during the second world war, the persecution of Jews in not just Poland, Germany and France, but in Latvia and Croatia and a plethora of other topics.
The novel has lists of names who people who died in the concentration camps, lists of those Nazi war criminals who were secret agents of the CIA, a chart of Jewish books that were stolen and digressions, that Andreas himself writes, should be slipped into the novel as extras, all things that in another writers hands might take you out of the reading experience but that here simply made me want to keep turning the pages.
As an alter ego for Drndic there is a meta aspect to the novel - Andreas mentions Drndic’s own novels and he also mentions a host of other writers including Stefan Zweig, Karl Knausgaard and Maaza Mengiste that I’m sure Drndic herself has met or has opinions on. Andreas often addresses the reader as he decides what should be written about now and what can wait, talking about people he has known, figures active in the politics of Croatia, for example, as well as his sister Ada and his father with whom there are some touching scenes. He writes about his psychiatrist friend Adam and reviews their cases in page after page as well as the very idea of mental health and how we treat those whose mental health is suffering.
He writes about language and how it is changing, its nuances disappearing, his aging process, what we do and don’t but should know about other countries and their history and how so much has been hidden and repressed and distorted. There are so many ideas in the pages as we follow Andreas through different locations and periods of history; as he writes, ‘I keep looking, following and trying to recognize those little sparks of suffering that flit all around me, to avoid the glimmers of my own madness.’
The writing is excellent which is also credit I’m sure to the translation by Celia Hawkesworth and there are beautiful lines that give pause to the sadness and brutality that Andreas is often laying out before us. I'll leave you with one;
‘It wasn’t winter, there was no snow, which these days I wish for with such longing, but in vain, because when it snows, silence falls from the sky onto my chest, feathery, tender and soft, a wounding silence, under which all living things collapse, to which all that breathes abandons itself.’
The novel has lists of names who people who died in the concentration camps, lists of those Nazi war criminals who were secret agents of the CIA, a chart of Jewish books that were stolen and digressions, that Andreas himself writes, should be slipped into the novel as extras, all things that in another writers hands might take you out of the reading experience but that here simply made me want to keep turning the pages.
As an alter ego for Drndic there is a meta aspect to the novel - Andreas mentions Drndic’s own novels and he also mentions a host of other writers including Stefan Zweig, Karl Knausgaard and Maaza Mengiste that I’m sure Drndic herself has met or has opinions on. Andreas often addresses the reader as he decides what should be written about now and what can wait, talking about people he has known, figures active in the politics of Croatia, for example, as well as his sister Ada and his father with whom there are some touching scenes. He writes about his psychiatrist friend Adam and reviews their cases in page after page as well as the very idea of mental health and how we treat those whose mental health is suffering.
He writes about language and how it is changing, its nuances disappearing, his aging process, what we do and don’t but should know about other countries and their history and how so much has been hidden and repressed and distorted. There are so many ideas in the pages as we follow Andreas through different locations and periods of history; as he writes, ‘I keep looking, following and trying to recognize those little sparks of suffering that flit all around me, to avoid the glimmers of my own madness.’
The writing is excellent which is also credit I’m sure to the translation by Celia Hawkesworth and there are beautiful lines that give pause to the sadness and brutality that Andreas is often laying out before us. I'll leave you with one;
‘It wasn’t winter, there was no snow, which these days I wish for with such longing, but in vain, because when it snows, silence falls from the sky onto my chest, feathery, tender and soft, a wounding silence, under which all living things collapse, to which all that breathes abandons itself.’
October 15, 2019
Could this be the most searing swan song ever written? Drndić bids us farewell (read: gives us the middle finger) with a veritable evisceration of our species' propensity for barbarity, brimming with the moral ferocity and panoramic history readers have come know and love (or should I say fear?). A dense, unflinching masterpiece.
April 29, 2025
Random library shelf pull for me, but so interesting and beautiful yet devastating in the intriguing parts but I definitely had to force myself to lock in at times. Sprawling, immense, heartbreaking and tragic filled with so much dark history of Fascism, Nazi Germany and the expansive loss of lives in result of war and the mark it leaves on the world, and makes us look directly in the faces of the perpetrators, murderers, while acknowledging the victims and innocent people above all. 3.5 rounded to 4
November 2, 2025
3.5/5 ⭐
Dasa is my 21st century GOAT but I think this one is her most uneven, probably my least favorite... Drndic completionism still feels like a worthy endeavor... Only two more to go 🤠
Dasa is my 21st century GOAT but I think this one is her most uneven, probably my least favorite... Drndic completionism still feels like a worthy endeavor... Only two more to go 🤠
June 19, 2019
“The pits began to fill.” [174]
What horrific images this brief paragraph-ending sentence rouses in the mind. If anything summarizes Daša Drndić’s powerful novel, this is it: The pits began to fill.
It begins with a long overdue visit, Andreas Ban, the fictional protagonist of this story, to his old family home in Rovinj, Croatia, to see his sister, Ada Ban. Reflecting on the family and of times past soon spirals into a maddening journey of discovery from Rovinj to Zagreb, Belgrade, Riga, Paris; searching through history for the lives of her grandfather, mother, and father. The story sweeps across the decades, from the beginning of the Twentieth Century to the present, over the countless mass graves scattered through Bikernieki Forest in Latvia from the Nazi occupation; to the siege of Sarajevo and the remnants of genocide.
I travel. I visit cities, people and memories corroded by time. [195]
EEG reminded me of the novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño: a mystery of sorts, a search for something or someone, midst an endless litany of corruption and degeneracy, murder, mass graves, genocide, the more horrific for the reality of it all. Like Bolaño, Drndić never flinches. This is serious, grim stuff.
Like the novels of W.G. Sebald, with their themes of memory, the uncovering of past evils, the blending of fact and fiction, EEG is difficult to categorize: novel, mystery, travelogue, history, memoir? In parts, all the above. These works are unconventional, will not be to everyone's liking. EEG may not be a light summer beach read, but it is a gripping tale that will stay with you long after you've turned the final page.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
What horrific images this brief paragraph-ending sentence rouses in the mind. If anything summarizes Daša Drndić’s powerful novel, this is it: The pits began to fill.
It begins with a long overdue visit, Andreas Ban, the fictional protagonist of this story, to his old family home in Rovinj, Croatia, to see his sister, Ada Ban. Reflecting on the family and of times past soon spirals into a maddening journey of discovery from Rovinj to Zagreb, Belgrade, Riga, Paris; searching through history for the lives of her grandfather, mother, and father. The story sweeps across the decades, from the beginning of the Twentieth Century to the present, over the countless mass graves scattered through Bikernieki Forest in Latvia from the Nazi occupation; to the siege of Sarajevo and the remnants of genocide.
I travel. I visit cities, people and memories corroded by time. [195]
EEG reminded me of the novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño: a mystery of sorts, a search for something or someone, midst an endless litany of corruption and degeneracy, murder, mass graves, genocide, the more horrific for the reality of it all. Like Bolaño, Drndić never flinches. This is serious, grim stuff.
Like the novels of W.G. Sebald, with their themes of memory, the uncovering of past evils, the blending of fact and fiction, EEG is difficult to categorize: novel, mystery, travelogue, history, memoir? In parts, all the above. These works are unconventional, will not be to everyone's liking. EEG may not be a light summer beach read, but it is a gripping tale that will stay with you long after you've turned the final page.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
June 18, 2019
I am all in favor of humanizing and lionizing the victims of injustice and murder. This book attempts to do that in the form of mini-biographies, lists of stolen possessions, and multiple other ways. It is interesting, but it is not a story and so it is easy to lose your way along the myriad words and paths.I'm glad I read it, but it would be hard to recommend it to someone else.
October 14, 2020
In the end, sublime. It requires some patience with the scattered and history-haunted first half. I loved that part too, but it does remain difficult to see where this all might be going. But Drndic masterfully gathers and tightens and then, gently devastating, whispers the perfect ending into your ear.
A new classic.
A new classic.
March 9, 2020
A parting masterpiece from one of the greatest writers of modern times. In her final work Drndic turns the blade of her ferocity back on herself, looking at complicity as it applies to her own family. Unsurprisingly astonishing.
January 6, 2024
EEG begins with a failed ending— Andreas Ban’s attempted suicide— and then accounts for why, or, perhaps, the aftermath. Drndić fills his time sheafing through a massive archive of psychological and bureaucratic dread. Failed escapes from mental entrapments. Such simple descriptions of this book put in mind the worst kind of slog, the list or accounting, yet Drinić’s ability to drop in a sentence of miraculous clarity buoys the relentlessness of her vision. EEG is a commonplace book confronting the granular, deep ways in which the scars of the 20th century affect us in the 21st. It’s a giant, terrifying mushrooming of fighting connections, shining a light on the depth of inner horror, but also pulsing out a hopeful atrophy. EEG is a disentangling.
Drndić died of lung cancer as the book was being released and it feels like an exhalation. But despite the brain neuron-mycelium metaphor, there is no direct reference to an electroencephalogram in the book. It’s not keen about respiratory systems, but brains acting in the ways they do. EEGs measure electrical activity in the brain, though, because as the Mayo clinic says, “brain cells communicate via electrical impulses and are active all the time, even during sleep,” and that “activity shows up as wavy lines on an EEG recording.”
Andreas Ban, a psychiatrist, and is keenly aware of his lack of coherence of such impulses, but it sounds like he does not know what to do other than recount. He is measuring in the dark, directly addressing the reader with lines like “What is the flow of my narrative? What is the theme?” (217). His own explanations are simply the day’s work: there are files about the Croatian complicity with the Nazis, and about other historical blindspots all over Central Europe, about the uncanny number of chess players who have become homicidal or suicidal, about the psychiatric communities failed attempts to deal with PTSD, about predatory fathers, and NKVD agents and GUP assassins, and precise numbers of reported antisemitic activities in Bosnia— sometimes Ban just trails off, explaining he does not want to explain ‘just now…’
Drndić’s book is attempting to reshape the form by which we remember, and Ban’s frenetic voice keeps folding back on itself. The central story (difficult to really see, I felt) is that, either after or before Ban’s suicide attempt, one of Ban’s friends, a doctor named Adam Kaplan, has also descended into madness. Or, maybe there are not two characters, because Ban begins saying and writing and recounting: “Whose voice is this? Adam Kaplan’s or mine?”
Drinić gives Ban’s voice something of a bibliography. Ban is influenced by those writers this book feels affinity for (Proust, Bernhard, Henry Miller, Alfred Perlès, Walser, Vsevolod Garshin, Stefan Zweig, Michio Kaku, Goran Ferčece, Danilo Kiš, Fernando Pessoa and Joseph Roth) yet is wholly different from. The book is a messy, mad mirror of the postwar era, and also a haven:
“During all wars, always and everywhere, people build niches, magic burrows in which they place their everyday lives, their mirages, their illusions of normality, in order to survive. (142).
At one point, we again hear the French aphorist “Cioran whispering: To an extent I acknowledged my country, which had given me such a significant opportunity for suffering, I love it because it could not respond to my expectations.” (391).
If you read this book solely for the constellation of references, it’s worth much more than the price of admission. (I picked up Roth’s Radetzky March for the first time and it’s miraculous). But, early on in the book, there’s Schopenhauer: “Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought. Of course, where there is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be so particularly painful. This sudden, sharp crack which paralyzes the brain, destroys all meditation, and murders thought, must cause pain to any one who has anything like an idea in his head,” (7).
Then soon after, Giono: “There are no heroes, the dead are immediately forgotten,” (11).
Still later: “People talk too much. In addition, they repeat their stupidities tirelessly, sometimes with variants in the scale of intonation, sometimes in a monotonous tone and rhythm, so that the listener feels as though he is being hit with a hammer. Know thyself, they say, know your non-self, your other self, know your collective self, know thyself, thine own self," (94).
Ban even later is admonishes the people talking about Game of Thrones when he would rather discuss filmmaker Roy Andersson, and then he brings it up, “Silence thudded into the risotto and the Tuscan red wine, hogwash remained on the table,” (331).
He badgers students as incorrigible: “When I used to talk about Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, 90 percent of them did not know what a tape recorder looked like, that unwieldy contraption with two wheels through which a tape slid. Then someone asked, Isn’t that machine from George Clooney’s film Good Night and Good Luck? Where does oblivion begin? In childhood?” (213).
He also says, on page 342, that he “shall not now sketch the political biography of Luciana Castellina” because it appears at this link: https://jacobin.com/2014/03/italian-communism-remembered/.
Ban’s accounting is a cup overflowing. Will there be a Jacobin in a few years time? Websites are, after all, destined to become forgotten just like cassette tapes. Events are not ignored they just don’t fit with the conception of the world. Reading Drndić in translation is a blessing because English readers are hearing a shout of tragic remembrance. She’s Croatian, and brings in little-heard stories, such as the tunnel beneath the Sarajevo Airport used during the Bosnian War or all the talk of cemeteries:
“...infirm pawns and swift hunters who broaden the field of battle in a light charge, rushing headline from the delimited battlefield into the abyss, sinking into nothingness, while above them, above their graves, lively and perfidious queens and lame kings, those majestic figures in our lives, continue their well-trodden path through time (56)
What is the use of all this accounting, especially when “Mementoes die as soon as they are plucked from their surroundings, they disperse, lose their color, lose their pliancy, stiffen like corpses…” (28)
Sometimes, the history writing just dies off under the weight of the information, such as Latvian Nazi deportments: “I have information about the date and place of their departure and arrival, about the number of children and their ages, about the number of women and men and about the number who died on the journey. If I start listening to it , someone might think that I am obsessed, ask why I have got so stuck, and say that it does not belong in literature… (175).
Other times, there is a direct accounting of data: “…and between 1990 and 2000 precisely 2,964 memorial signs, 731 monuments, and 2,233 other kidneys of memorial signs were destroyed or damaged (by whom?)” (279).
And finally, there are the power images of the intimate accounts. The human element which is behind ocean of data and the numbers which Drndić is confronting in the internet age. There is deft imagery which allows for subtle callbacks, such as Ban’s patient’s Alber’s dream:
“I go to take a shower, the bath is full of fat women squeezed into one end of the tub. I get in, but I can't stretch out my legs, which annoys me. What’s more, someone has hung their clothes on the rail for the shower curtain, so I can't pull the curtain, I'm afraid I’ll splash the bathroom. But there;’s no way I’ll splash anything given that the bath is full of women. Then suddenly everything and everyone disappears, even the water. I’m left sitting in the empty tub,” (359).
And patient Rudolf’s suicide by pneumonia at the state home. “A week later I got a telephone call: Rudolf has a high temperature and pneumonia. His roomate, Zvonko, the one who came to the Zagreb funeral, told me, He sat in the cold bathroom, wet after being showered. He didn’t want to dry himself. Leave me alone, he kept saying,” (387).
Drndić died of lung cancer as the book was being released and it feels like an exhalation. But despite the brain neuron-mycelium metaphor, there is no direct reference to an electroencephalogram in the book. It’s not keen about respiratory systems, but brains acting in the ways they do. EEGs measure electrical activity in the brain, though, because as the Mayo clinic says, “brain cells communicate via electrical impulses and are active all the time, even during sleep,” and that “activity shows up as wavy lines on an EEG recording.”
Andreas Ban, a psychiatrist, and is keenly aware of his lack of coherence of such impulses, but it sounds like he does not know what to do other than recount. He is measuring in the dark, directly addressing the reader with lines like “What is the flow of my narrative? What is the theme?” (217). His own explanations are simply the day’s work: there are files about the Croatian complicity with the Nazis, and about other historical blindspots all over Central Europe, about the uncanny number of chess players who have become homicidal or suicidal, about the psychiatric communities failed attempts to deal with PTSD, about predatory fathers, and NKVD agents and GUP assassins, and precise numbers of reported antisemitic activities in Bosnia— sometimes Ban just trails off, explaining he does not want to explain ‘just now…’
Drndić’s book is attempting to reshape the form by which we remember, and Ban’s frenetic voice keeps folding back on itself. The central story (difficult to really see, I felt) is that, either after or before Ban’s suicide attempt, one of Ban’s friends, a doctor named Adam Kaplan, has also descended into madness. Or, maybe there are not two characters, because Ban begins saying and writing and recounting: “Whose voice is this? Adam Kaplan’s or mine?”
Drinić gives Ban’s voice something of a bibliography. Ban is influenced by those writers this book feels affinity for (Proust, Bernhard, Henry Miller, Alfred Perlès, Walser, Vsevolod Garshin, Stefan Zweig, Michio Kaku, Goran Ferčece, Danilo Kiš, Fernando Pessoa and Joseph Roth) yet is wholly different from. The book is a messy, mad mirror of the postwar era, and also a haven:
“During all wars, always and everywhere, people build niches, magic burrows in which they place their everyday lives, their mirages, their illusions of normality, in order to survive. (142).
At one point, we again hear the French aphorist “Cioran whispering: To an extent I acknowledged my country, which had given me such a significant opportunity for suffering, I love it because it could not respond to my expectations.” (391).
If you read this book solely for the constellation of references, it’s worth much more than the price of admission. (I picked up Roth’s Radetzky March for the first time and it’s miraculous). But, early on in the book, there’s Schopenhauer: “Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption. It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought. Of course, where there is nothing to interrupt, noise will not be so particularly painful. This sudden, sharp crack which paralyzes the brain, destroys all meditation, and murders thought, must cause pain to any one who has anything like an idea in his head,” (7).
Then soon after, Giono: “There are no heroes, the dead are immediately forgotten,” (11).
Still later: “People talk too much. In addition, they repeat their stupidities tirelessly, sometimes with variants in the scale of intonation, sometimes in a monotonous tone and rhythm, so that the listener feels as though he is being hit with a hammer. Know thyself, they say, know your non-self, your other self, know your collective self, know thyself, thine own self," (94).
Ban even later is admonishes the people talking about Game of Thrones when he would rather discuss filmmaker Roy Andersson, and then he brings it up, “Silence thudded into the risotto and the Tuscan red wine, hogwash remained on the table,” (331).
He badgers students as incorrigible: “When I used to talk about Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, 90 percent of them did not know what a tape recorder looked like, that unwieldy contraption with two wheels through which a tape slid. Then someone asked, Isn’t that machine from George Clooney’s film Good Night and Good Luck? Where does oblivion begin? In childhood?” (213).
He also says, on page 342, that he “shall not now sketch the political biography of Luciana Castellina” because it appears at this link: https://jacobin.com/2014/03/italian-communism-remembered/.
Ban’s accounting is a cup overflowing. Will there be a Jacobin in a few years time? Websites are, after all, destined to become forgotten just like cassette tapes. Events are not ignored they just don’t fit with the conception of the world. Reading Drndić in translation is a blessing because English readers are hearing a shout of tragic remembrance. She’s Croatian, and brings in little-heard stories, such as the tunnel beneath the Sarajevo Airport used during the Bosnian War or all the talk of cemeteries:
“...infirm pawns and swift hunters who broaden the field of battle in a light charge, rushing headline from the delimited battlefield into the abyss, sinking into nothingness, while above them, above their graves, lively and perfidious queens and lame kings, those majestic figures in our lives, continue their well-trodden path through time (56)
What is the use of all this accounting, especially when “Mementoes die as soon as they are plucked from their surroundings, they disperse, lose their color, lose their pliancy, stiffen like corpses…” (28)
Sometimes, the history writing just dies off under the weight of the information, such as Latvian Nazi deportments: “I have information about the date and place of their departure and arrival, about the number of children and their ages, about the number of women and men and about the number who died on the journey. If I start listening to it , someone might think that I am obsessed, ask why I have got so stuck, and say that it does not belong in literature… (175).
Other times, there is a direct accounting of data: “…and between 1990 and 2000 precisely 2,964 memorial signs, 731 monuments, and 2,233 other kidneys of memorial signs were destroyed or damaged (by whom?)” (279).
And finally, there are the power images of the intimate accounts. The human element which is behind ocean of data and the numbers which Drndić is confronting in the internet age. There is deft imagery which allows for subtle callbacks, such as Ban’s patient’s Alber’s dream:
“I go to take a shower, the bath is full of fat women squeezed into one end of the tub. I get in, but I can't stretch out my legs, which annoys me. What’s more, someone has hung their clothes on the rail for the shower curtain, so I can't pull the curtain, I'm afraid I’ll splash the bathroom. But there;’s no way I’ll splash anything given that the bath is full of women. Then suddenly everything and everyone disappears, even the water. I’m left sitting in the empty tub,” (359).
And patient Rudolf’s suicide by pneumonia at the state home. “A week later I got a telephone call: Rudolf has a high temperature and pneumonia. His roomate, Zvonko, the one who came to the Zagreb funeral, told me, He sat in the cold bathroom, wet after being showered. He didn’t want to dry himself. Leave me alone, he kept saying,” (387).
September 21, 2021
For me a bit too much like Doppelgänger, which one would think makes EEG hard no to love unreservedly. Still, a thing can be done quite well and even so not amaze based on expectations. Drndić was a gifted writer and the imaginative and inventive ways she brought the horrors of the 19th and 20th centuries to greater attention must be lauded. I am not sure where this one stopped feeling intriguing and started feeling trite, which is an awful adjective to utilize in a review for Drndić, or anyone else for that matter. This felt less like a novel - if either book mentioned here could be considered that, however obliquely - and more like a personal journey via literature. A fascinating one, but ultimately almost bland. An odd feeling, that. Could be I have too much reading in the historical areas/eras she catalogues, so the effect is of repetition, not revelation? I did enjoy Drndić' tangents and distractions and musings, but many of them are strikingly similar in tone and affect to the novel preceding this one. Again, too much and expectations soften the grandeur for me. Definitely a book to be read by as many people as possible. There are facts and figures and truths to be found throughout. Do not expect to feel good while reading it, and probably expect to feel worse upon finishing, but neither of those should be detriments to traversing another finely crafted book by Daša Drndić, an author and thinker who is sorely missed.
September 25, 2023
EEG is a return to Croatian writer Drndić's character (and possible alter-ego) Andreas Ban, who made a huge impression on me in her 2012 novel, Belladonna (EEG was her next novel, published in 2016, and was her last). This book significantly expands on the person of Andreas Ban, allowing him to swim out to even deeper waters where his outlook becomes more fragmented and decentered, wholly coming to resemble the lives which he describes:
And there is a vast array of lives on offer here, such as an extended soliloquy on the tragic deaths of European chess masters:
And also:
But then Ban offers what the 20th Century history of chess can teach us:
Ban also never strays very far from the topic of war:
Parts of that quote can be found in her previous book—see my review of that one. At any rate, here is Ban furthering his dialogue with WWII: Latvia as a logistical hub in the Nazi execution of the Holocaust:
And so many other such "digressionary little tales," many to do with literature:
Also often combined with another of his favorite topics: time:
And more than a few about Daniil Kharms:
Also a trip to Italy:
And a few to Paris too:
ANd what about the title of this book?
And overall, the topic of writing, both what Ban(and Drndić writes about, and how s/he goes about it (or does not go about it):
Along with:
What to do with the lives around us, within us? How to classify them? They are and are not examined lives, monochrome canvases with blots, smudges, freckles scattered over a space made up of shackled time.
Examined lives (canvases), crisscrossed with shallow empty spaces, dappled with little bumps—hillocks—and narrow furrows, cuttings, grooves, many alike, in which slow, stagnant waters swirl. Lives with rounded edges, easily catalogued, easily connected, easily nailed onto the shelves of memory. And forgotten there.
Then, those others: lives crisscrossed, entangled, knotted with veins, scars, clefts which continue to breathe under the gravestones over the little mounds of our being, scabbed-over wounds that still bleed within. Impenetrable lives. They flicker in the darkness, sending out little sparks of light, fluorescent, like the bones of corpses.
And there is a vast array of lives on offer here, such as an extended soliloquy on the tragic deaths of European chess masters:
The Nazis do not only liquidate Polish chess players, not at all, the honor is bestowed wherever the SS boot treads. The famous Czech chess player Karel Treybal (b. 1885) is falsely accused of hiding weapons for members of the Resistance Movement, and after a brief trial is liquidated in 1941 in Prague. His body is never found. And so on, not to extend the story, which of its own accord stretches in space and time here and there, left and right, forward and backward, endlessly.
And also:
Comrade Товариш (Stalin) does not arrest only members of the Soviet Chess Organization; a number of interesting Soviet and internationally famous chess "brands" also come to grief. Paranoid as he was, Koba imagines that the geophysical engineer and one of the strongest Siberian chess players Pyotr Nikolaevich Izmailov (1906-37) is preparing an attempt on his life, and arrests him in 1936 and, less than a year later, shoots him.
But then Ban offers what the 20th Century history of chess can teach us:
It would be possible to say a lot and at length about the sly fox and good chess player Krylenko, the highly placed prosecutor in the political show trials of Stalin's reign of terror, who (not unusually) himself ended up a victim, a whole book could be written with just a list of the people whose torture and execution he oversaw, but no. Few people today are interested, because nowadays such hideous things no longer occur. On the whole. Then Stalin dies, and Krylenko is resurrected. In the 1960s Krylenko's great contribution to the development of Soviet chess is acknowledged, he is proclaimed its father, and in 1989 he receives a commemorative coin with his image. And then the Soviet Union disappears.
That's how one should look at history. In an easygoing manner. Briefly. By leaps and bounds. After Stalin's death many players of the USSR—and hundreds of thousands of people who were not chess players—were rehabilitated.
Ban also never strays very far from the topic of war:
I read somewhere that wars are an orgy of forgetting. The twentieth century archived vast catacombs, subways of data in which the researcher gets lost and in the end abandons the search, catacombs into which ever fewer people go, buried—forgotten. The twentieth century, the century of great spring cleaning which ended with cleansing; the twentieth century, the century of cleansing, the century of erasure. Didn't Pliny write somewhere that nothing about us is as fragile as memory, that dubious ability that a person constructs and deconstructs? Whom can I ask now? How can I resolve this family puzzle?
Parts of that quote can be found in her previous book—see my review of that one. At any rate, here is Ban furthering his dialogue with WWII: Latvia as a logistical hub in the Nazi execution of the Holocaust:
Trains from the countries under Hitler's occupation continued to arrive regularly in Latvia. I have information about a hundred and thirty (130) trains with roughly a thousand "passengers" in each, I have information about the date and place of their departure and arrival, about the number of children and their ages, about the number of women and men and about the number who died on the journey. If I start listing it, someone might think that I am obsessed, ask why I have got so stuck, and say that that does not belong in literature, that those are nothing but the most ordinary defamatory scribblings. So I won't list anything so as not to upset potential readers. Just this: the passengers in those trains were Germans, Austrians, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Jews and Roma, political prisoners, homosexuals, psychiatric patients, and so on, a familiar story of horror, one hundred and thirty thousand (130,000) souls.
And so many other such "digressionary little tales," many to do with literature:
Goran also writes about the need to flee, and he's so young. The world has been completely flattened, he says, there's nowhere one can disappear, he says, then he talks about shoes, which are for him little apartments. Many people write or have written about shoes, Hamsun, or let's say Bernhard, but one could write about the shoes of those who did not write about shoes, who died frozen in the snow, like Robert Walser, or in their cold huts, about the shoes of those who languish in madhouses, for instance. Goran sees shoes as a metaphor for constant movement, I see them as a deception. Shoes which pinch or fall off, which wear out, which camouflage or disclose, which are agreeable or disagreeable, which leave marks or cover them over. Which sometimes drive one mad.
Also often combined with another of his favorite topics: time:
In Brussels I corresponded with Goran about Danilo Kiš. Goran told me that, for him, Kiš was distant in time, which wasn't entirely clear to me, because time is always here, it doesn't go anywhere, it comes, but it doesn't go, it doesn't move further away or come closer, it just flows, and sometimes trickles and drips and one can always plunge into it, one can also drown in it, as Magritte's mother did, and many others, Virginia Woolf for example, but, in the end, one always emerges from it, from time. I don't have a problem with time, I am just ironing my youth.
And more than a few about Daniil Kharms:
There was a word Daniil Kharms bad forgotten, be simply couldn't remember what word it was, but it seemed to him so important to remember that word, so important, as though his life depended on it.
Beginning with M?
With R?
Yes, with R.
I said: Reason.
Kharms said: It's driving me mad.
I said: Radiance.
He said: I'm going to cry!
I said: Frame.
He threw the picture onto the ground.
I said: Reins.
He took the bridle off, leaped onto the horse and rode off bareback.
Also a trip to Italy:
It was as though, during my stay in Tuscany, I had ended up in an American period drama, but there is no drama. I floated on great, terrifying beauty (la grande bellezza) and cursed Sorrentino and his ghastly film.
Then again I was amused to be a participant in an operetta, whose music I imagined, could hear, but that was inaudible to the people on the estate. Secretly I spent time with Gombrowicz, watching the actors of the Tuscan vaudeville changing their costumes and masks as they acted in the grotesque tragicomedy of the present, like characters from Gombrowicz's Operetta, those not exactly frivolous entertainments for the mannequin dolls of the past. I observed the way this little closed society did not see the signals being sent to it by a distant lighthouse, or the angel of history, that Angelus Novus of Klee's, the way they did not know that their operetta was sending out the first (or last) notes of Eu- rope's funeral march as it is laid to rest.
And a few to Paris too:
In this last Paris, I got lost. My purpose frayed. My focus misted over. It's cold in my room, I have no power socket in the bathroom—I shave with no mirror, blindly. When it rains, the roof leaks. I wander about and come across closed bookshops, their windows covered in sheets of brown paper, and, every so often, buyers of gold—achat d'or. The streets are full of dog shit, men piss at the corners, both those in expensive suits and the homeless, but there are too many homeless, so as soon as the sun warms up or the wind blows, the urine evaporates.
ANd what about the title of this book?
Magnetic resonance carried out. Blood count within the limits of normal. Endocrinological tests, no observations. EEG shows no symptoms of epilepsy.
And overall, the topic of writing, both what Ban(and Drndić writes about, and how s/he goes about it (or does not go about it):
Now, if one is to write, and what is written is of absolutely no use to the deformed human race, it is best to "invent" a story that has already been told with as many words as possible on as many pages as possible and blend it all into a child's drawing. For the sake of comprehension. For the sake of ease. For the sake of breeziness which will undulate like a current of air above the trash heap of our existence, to drive away (our) stench, so that, at least for a moment, we can believe that we are not ebbing away, that we are not leaking out like black slime. No allusions, heaven forbid, no metaphors or symbols, but sticking one's finger straight into the shit. Make it simple. But I'm not offering "a story," because I write about people who don't have "a story," not about those or for those who are looking for other people's stories to find their own.
Along with:
We talked about other things, that winter, Goran Ferčec and I, we talked for almost a month, he in Budapest, Maribor, Koprivnica, Zagreb and Belgrade, I buried in Brussels. If I were to mention the majority of the subjects we thrashed out, I would do even more damage to the form, the form of this text of mine, wouldn't I? Which would further upset its blinded readers (and critics) who look for a cemented form of regular shapes, harmonious outlines, a form filled with a cascade of connected words, of which it would be possible to say that its characters are nuanced, the relation- ships, emotions and reflections distinctive, and the style polished that the ease of narration comes to full expression (whatever that means), that the characters are alive and convincing and remind us of people we know, we feel close to their doubts, their fears, their expectations and disappointments. What vacuity.
July 24, 2019
I was going to say that EEG is not so much a novel as it is an act of witness. But it is more than that. It is an investigation, indictment, presentation of evidence, and judgment of the individual perpetrators as well as the governments and cultures that committed, permitted, encouraged, or turned a blind eye toward genocide and other atrocities in Croatia and elsewhere in Europe in the 20th century. The punishment is the literal accumulation of sentences in this book, a particularized and uncompromising record that exposes the truths that others have attempted to hide, a condemnation intended to outlive those it convicts. EEG is powerful in the extreme.
February 12, 2021
Drndic's swan-song. While I enjoyed this novel, with its inflections of Bernhard and Sebald but distinctively Drndic's own unmistakable style, I preferred Belladonna's formalistic experiments a bit more. I'm looking forward to reading two more from Drndic, Doppelganger and Trieste.
September 19, 2021
Once again my return to Florence from a long summer spent in California means debilitating jet-lag right after a good long read on an intercontinental flight and I find myself too mentally fuzzy to do real justice to an exception work of literature. I finished up EEG on said flight and now, a week later and barely recovering from my long journey, I sit down to try to say something comprehensible about the novel. (My home internet being down all week has only aided and abetted my tardiness and mental frustration.)
In general, EEG is a good read if not what I would call a great novel. It, like my review so far, is highly personal to its narrator, a Croation writer (of what category of prose exactly we never do find out—“Long Books” is the best we get from him—psychology perhaps as he does have the case histories of several mental patients, which he presents to us and he appears to have worked as a psychologist) named Ban, and rambles along with this aging intellectual’s mind through a good 400 pages with no immediately discernable program, organization, or form. Compare this to our commonly accepted aesthetic criteria for a great novel and construct your own negative review.
Despite the above warning to knee-jerk criticisms, you will note I’ve given the book four stars and therefor think it’s better than what a strictly formalist critique might decide. Here’s what I think great about it: By eschewing Modernist organization EEG actually feels more real that any so-called realistic novel. Ban is a living, breathing consciousness here far more revealed and palpable than the artistically-inserted-into-plots heroes of most self-proclaimed realistic or modernist novels. His story, his aging grumpiness, and his sensitivity to history and the decay of his own family through the major shifts in name and identity in the Balkans from the end of WWII, through the Communist period, the civil war and breakup of the ex-Yugoslavia, and into the new European Union period are important and illuminating.
If, like me, you don’t read for comfort and recognition value but rather seek, at least occasionally, to step outside of your own culture and to learn from wholly other human experiences, EEG is a terrific catalogue of the Balkan and European experience of the Second World War, Eastern European communist regimes in that war’s wake, and the breakup of the Eastern Bloc and the passage into the new European Union situation. Like all of Drndic’s novels—I understand, as I’ve only read this one and the aesthetically superior though no less interesting for that Trieste—EEG tells us how much all of Europe was effected by the holocaust and Nazism and how the split in European culture between the failed dream of communism and the radical capitalism called National Socialism or Fascism for the better part of the last century left almost all European families torn and bloodied in one way or another. (The themes of this novel, born of this cultural schism and the aftereffects of the war between the Nazis and Communists, are, I believe, the forced interruptions of normal social life of the war and its aftereffects: madness and despair, disappointment and guilt, mental incarceration and suicide.) I learned a lot. And I appreciated the piecemeal way that Ban’s personal experiences and family history were told, even if the novel didn’t wow me with some formal, novelistic, aesthetic principle—yeah, I like that stuff too.
And, as a kind of PS, I guess I should say that I, too, am a grumpy older writer of books who lives close enough to Istria and that crossroads city of Trieste, both Austrian and Italian—Northern and Southern European—also once at the border between capitalist Italy and Communist Yugoslavia—therefore Western and Eastern Europe—to have gotten a pretty good dose of familiarity and recognition value out of EEG as well—even if my family was in the U.S.A. and fighting in the South Seas during Europe’s most traumatic historical moment of the last century.
In general, EEG is a good read if not what I would call a great novel. It, like my review so far, is highly personal to its narrator, a Croation writer (of what category of prose exactly we never do find out—“Long Books” is the best we get from him—psychology perhaps as he does have the case histories of several mental patients, which he presents to us and he appears to have worked as a psychologist) named Ban, and rambles along with this aging intellectual’s mind through a good 400 pages with no immediately discernable program, organization, or form. Compare this to our commonly accepted aesthetic criteria for a great novel and construct your own negative review.
Despite the above warning to knee-jerk criticisms, you will note I’ve given the book four stars and therefor think it’s better than what a strictly formalist critique might decide. Here’s what I think great about it: By eschewing Modernist organization EEG actually feels more real that any so-called realistic novel. Ban is a living, breathing consciousness here far more revealed and palpable than the artistically-inserted-into-plots heroes of most self-proclaimed realistic or modernist novels. His story, his aging grumpiness, and his sensitivity to history and the decay of his own family through the major shifts in name and identity in the Balkans from the end of WWII, through the Communist period, the civil war and breakup of the ex-Yugoslavia, and into the new European Union period are important and illuminating.
If, like me, you don’t read for comfort and recognition value but rather seek, at least occasionally, to step outside of your own culture and to learn from wholly other human experiences, EEG is a terrific catalogue of the Balkan and European experience of the Second World War, Eastern European communist regimes in that war’s wake, and the breakup of the Eastern Bloc and the passage into the new European Union situation. Like all of Drndic’s novels—I understand, as I’ve only read this one and the aesthetically superior though no less interesting for that Trieste—EEG tells us how much all of Europe was effected by the holocaust and Nazism and how the split in European culture between the failed dream of communism and the radical capitalism called National Socialism or Fascism for the better part of the last century left almost all European families torn and bloodied in one way or another. (The themes of this novel, born of this cultural schism and the aftereffects of the war between the Nazis and Communists, are, I believe, the forced interruptions of normal social life of the war and its aftereffects: madness and despair, disappointment and guilt, mental incarceration and suicide.) I learned a lot. And I appreciated the piecemeal way that Ban’s personal experiences and family history were told, even if the novel didn’t wow me with some formal, novelistic, aesthetic principle—yeah, I like that stuff too.
And, as a kind of PS, I guess I should say that I, too, am a grumpy older writer of books who lives close enough to Istria and that crossroads city of Trieste, both Austrian and Italian—Northern and Southern European—also once at the border between capitalist Italy and Communist Yugoslavia—therefore Western and Eastern Europe—to have gotten a pretty good dose of familiarity and recognition value out of EEG as well—even if my family was in the U.S.A. and fighting in the South Seas during Europe’s most traumatic historical moment of the last century.
September 3, 2019
The second book I've read by Drndic and not the last (although, sadly, the author died in 2018. This is an extraordinarily powerful book. While there is a personal "story line," as we follow Ban, the psychologist who didn't - we learn in the first sentence - kill himself after threatening too in the author's previous book, the story line is deeply entangled with the stories of loss through war and fascism and political violence and fascism. We learn - through lists partially - of the chess players killed by the Nazis and Soviets and suicide. And the contents of Jewish owned apartments raided by the Gestapo in Paris - listed, one by one. So often I felt like crying. Read this book.
February 14, 2020
Seems like it took a long time to finish this beautifully written, difficult book. Not easy reading so maybe that explains it. When I finally completed it last night at around midnight I felt a sense of relief. The subject matter is heavy and often sad, but Drndic makes some of this horror bearable with her dark, cutting humor. Sickness, memory, the indignities of life before, during and after wars and calamities, are listed here in detail. It seems that Drndic wants to list every casualty of war, every demon who inflicted pain on others with their short lived illusive power to do so. What was particularly terrifying was this book's relevance to today's ugly political climate.
April 21, 2020
Wonderful, such a powerful original voice. Disturbing how many war criminals wound up in Melbourne. Disturbing, but not surprising, those fuckers are everywhere. We need to pick up Drndic's mission and keep fighting, especially now.
"It's best not to go out. Every time I go out, I tell myself, earplugs, don't forget your earplugs. Then I forget them...
"At the table next to mine at the little pavement cafe , three women were shrieking, grinding words like rolling small pebbles around with their tongues and spitting degenerate phlegm (sound monsters) in all directions...
"'Get lost , old man, fuck off'".
"It's best not to go out. Every time I go out, I tell myself, earplugs, don't forget your earplugs. Then I forget them...
"At the table next to mine at the little pavement cafe , three women were shrieking, grinding words like rolling small pebbles around with their tongues and spitting degenerate phlegm (sound monsters) in all directions...
"'Get lost , old man, fuck off'".
July 5, 2020
I could not even finish this book. I got 3/4 of the way through and still could not even say what it is about. This quote (from the book itself) sums up its own nature "...what i was writing was not a diary, nor a travelogue, nor a novel, but something in between, a kind of lame, crippled scampering through condensed time, through particles of time which had become detached from themselves to float through the underpasses of the present..."
April 26, 2019
Last June, Daša Drndić joined the pantheon of great novelists who are dead. Oh, how it can seem all good novels are written by dead novelists, how I wish I could have read this when she was still alive!
E.E.G. is both separate and a continuation from 'part one' Belladonna and it captures in a more crucial sense than the previous that the individual must protect itself and provide nourishment via the history of the footsteps that the individual has taken. To relate to Soviet chess players, to a psychiatric patient who has set them-self on a quest to help the town's pigeons, to the novel showing it's own awareness multiple times, and not even in a smarmy 'oh isn't this fourth-wall breaking so clever, where is my round of applause' but in way that feels logical as what else can we do when we reach a certain point in our minds we recite ourselves, we reference to our condition of the present, this novel muses on the power of the 'I' and does it so well because it investigates it.
This is not a novel about embracing 'the end', but a novel that embraces the dissolution of the self, because we all live on for an imprecise amount of time that is not in our control, or even through the actions we take, but through the collective memory of the societies that we create and are indebted to our own memories.
Isn't it predictable that we always end with death?
E.E.G. is both separate and a continuation from 'part one' Belladonna and it captures in a more crucial sense than the previous that the individual must protect itself and provide nourishment via the history of the footsteps that the individual has taken. To relate to Soviet chess players, to a psychiatric patient who has set them-self on a quest to help the town's pigeons, to the novel showing it's own awareness multiple times, and not even in a smarmy 'oh isn't this fourth-wall breaking so clever, where is my round of applause' but in way that feels logical as what else can we do when we reach a certain point in our minds we recite ourselves, we reference to our condition of the present, this novel muses on the power of the 'I' and does it so well because it investigates it.
This is not a novel about embracing 'the end', but a novel that embraces the dissolution of the self, because we all live on for an imprecise amount of time that is not in our control, or even through the actions we take, but through the collective memory of the societies that we create and are indebted to our own memories.
Isn't it predictable that we always end with death?
September 18, 2025
I had given this book 4 stars, but now I've changed it to 5.
My review: F*ck fascists!
Previous review:
My review: F*ck fascists!
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