Join us for our A Season Of book club, in which we’ll spend several splendid months discussing books by a single author, or reading one lengthy work in smaller bites. This will be a friendly, informal, non-academic chat, and everyone is welcome to join us. For the next few months we’ll be discussing Croatian novelist Daša Drndić, and our October book is EEG.
In this breathtaking final work, Dasa Drndic reaches new heights. Andreas Ban’s suicide attempt has failed. Though very ill, he still finds the will to tap on the glass of history to summon those imprisoned within. Mercilessly, he dissects society and his environment, shunning all favors as he goes after the evils and hidden secrets of our times. History remembers the names of the perpetrators, not the victims—Ban remembers and honors the lost. He travels from Rijeka to Zagreb, from Belgrade to Tirana, from Parisian avenues to Italian castles. Ghosts follow him wherever he goes: chess grandmasters who disappeared during WWII; the lost inhabitants of Latvia; war criminals who found work in the CIA and died peacefully in their beds. Ban’s family is with him too, those already dead and those with one foot in the grave. As if left with only a few pieces in a chess game, Andreas Ban—and Dasa Drndic—play a stunning last match against Death.
This meeting will take place virtually via Zoom. If you’d like to join in the online chat, PLEASE RSVP tracey@malvernbooks.com with “season of book club” in the subject line. The book can be purchased via our online store or at Malvern Books. (Call us on 512-322-2097 if you’d prefer curbside pick up.) We offer a 10% discount in-store on all current book club titles.
Daša Drndić (1946 – 2018) was a Croatian writer. She is best known for her acclaimed novel Sonnenschein (2007), which was translated into English as Trieste and shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She was also awarded the 2018 Warwick Prize for Belladonna, which the Times Literary Supplement called “one of the strangest and strongest books.” Her final book, EEG, won the Best Translated Book Award in 2020. In Drndić’s obituary in The Guardian, Amanda Hopkinson wrote, “[She] was incapable of writing a sentence that was not forceful, fierce or funny—or all three simultaneously. A major theme in her life’s writing, which comprised a dozen novels and some 30 plays, has been the overlooked (or deliberately omitted) complicity of her native Croatia in the Holocaust, expressed in a style that has been described by critics as ‘neo-Borgesian.'” Drndić was also a longstanding activist in PEN Croatia and the Croatian Writers’ Association, and in numerous free speech and human rights campaigns.
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Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82152478111?pwd=RGE4NXQzYlJNREtpdXFiYXhEckw2Zz09
Meeting ID: 821 5247 8111
Passcode: 620875