A soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition and failure--Ivana Sajko paints a portrait of an intellectual at a crossroads.
Captivating ... Witty ... The translator Mima Simic shows great dexterity in her rendering of Sajko’s lyrical, run-on sentences. They hurtle forward like a TGV, making manifest Iv.’s struggle to speak of his despair ... Fancy footwork with semicolons and em-dashes extend the sentences over several pages.
Every chapter is a single sentence running for pages ... An unsettling rhythm ... The prose flows in sync with the protagonist’s thoughts: now rolling along, now jolting on the tracks, now braking hard ... Jostling in the narrator’s head are weighty themes: love and loss, alienation and belonging, tradition and renewal ... The images haunting him become lodged in our minds too.
Simić’s thrilling translation is endlessly inventive ... Sajko vividly captures the way in which travel suspends both time and place in scenes that are at once real and dreamlike ... Every Time We Say Goodbye is a threnody to leave-taking – elegant, mournful, and profoundly human.
