Words and Sentences in Every Time We Say Goodbye
Dan White
Book Review
A review of Ivana Sajko’s Every Time We Say Goodbye (Biblioasis). Purchase the novel directly from the publisher here.
Here again is the old debate. Form or content. What about, form and content? Form as content? Why do these ideas persevere, adamantine, in obstinate conflict? It is an evergreen worry of literature to resist lapsing too far into, ironically, narrative: too much didacticism does not a compelling novel make. And therein lies the tension, because the literary art is constructed of a medium of words, coming together in a language the purpose of which is to communicate information. So how do we ensure our language does not become overly communicative, to not tell but show, to walk a certain term among twilight fields of sentences until, stirring, the light of a knowing more comprehensive than elaborated—more bodily, perhaps, than mere minded matters—appears?
What are we talking about? This is a book review, specifically of Ivana Sajko’s short, sharp, frenetic novel Every Time We Say Goodbye, translated from the Croatian (and titled into English thusly) by Mima Simić. Set ostensibly someplace in Germany, on a train to Berlin, the novel mediates on relationships, nostalgia, and violence in the long aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars, never quite named as such but—as with The Troubles in Anna Burns’ Milkman—clear enough to the reader. The “ostensibly” in the previous sentence gets us to the crux of the (any?) novel: form. Every Time We Say Goodbye is written in a series of single sentences while the inevitably-unnamed narrator rides through Germany towards some notion of a new beginning, which allows the book to deal largely in memory, moving fluidly across time and space. Fresh off leaving his longtime partner, he unrolls his life for the reader in littoral compounds, commas like breaks in the waves, which gives Sajko’s style—and Simić’s translation—a hypnotic effect, carrying the reader along literal and metaphorical journeys alike:
…just as no one but me misses the books I have not written, this is our life, this was our life, this was just a week ago, those were our days, that was my cadaver in the apartment that I called inhospitable yet I could not leave, she called it a dump although she never allowed for it to truly become one, she cleaned, she cooked and decorated the shelves with cacti, trying her best to brighten it up, whereas I never even tried, I let myself off with the thought that I was just passing through, that I asked nothing from her and expected nothing, and so I could not be responsible for her discontent…
The admixture of detail-specify and free-associative thought is a foundational strength of the novel, allowing Sajko to bring the reader into discrete moments with impressive verisimilitude and depth even as those moments speed along with our narrator’s contrastive contemplation. Beginning with its dynamic, meta-narrative opening about writing a book about a character riding a train, the novel forges its own momentum and then jealously guards it.
That Sajko has broken up her chapters into, well, chapters helps; she’s able to move from one thread of memory to another by leverage those stopping points as-needed. In that way there’s something of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport here—although sans any tracking of a rogue mountain lion—another formally inventive release from Biblioasis in recent years. Indeed it is spiriting to see novels doing so bold work in narration and form continue to appear in the North American literary market, a landscape in perpetual need of such revitalization.
The real analogue to Sajko’s impressive work, though, is Matais Énard’s Zone, which similarly features a first-person narrator riding a train across Europe recalling past deeds while constructed in a single sentence. The parallels are so striking that it cannot be accidental; in both style and subject matter Every Time We Say Goodbye reads like a direct literary descendant of Énard’s 2008 tour de force. Beyond being built on a homodiegetic narration operating via free-associative logic, both novels also explore the tempestuous, conflict-strewn end of the 20th century as it closed in the Balkans. Zone is as compelling a novel, formally, as has appeared in this century, and Sajko is a fine inheritor of that legacy. Every Time We Say Goodbye wields its relentless narration in vivid renderings of the cost of “one of those wars that supposedly never happened,” referring to the global narrative of peace post-Second World War, which largely ignored the conflicts in Southern and Eastern Europe. “it was the first time I head him cry,” the narrator says, remembering a phone call with his semi-estranged father:
and now I reflect on the irony of it all; that a war which never happened had to start, that people seventy-plus years of European peace, that who weren’t torched had to be torched, that all those unfortunate women who weren’t massacred had to be massacred, for my father who never hugged me, to hug me at last.
Among other achievements—not the least being the artistic accomplishments of the novel as a literary object—the style gives Sajko extensive space to mine these more emotionally resonant moments; the single, rolling sentences flatten the affect enough to enable her to slip around the saccharine or the trite in making her direct approach to topics and scenes that otherwise would threaten such maudlin danger. The beauty of the single sentence is that everything—from the details of the train to memories of the narrator’s brother being shot—is on the same plane, simply facts of life, as we as the reader are not imposed-upon but rather presented-to.
This reliance on style of course in turn relies on translation, which strikes the reader in English as immersive and natural, holding up against the immense pressure the novel’s narrational approach places on it. In an interview with the publisher, Simić discusses the balance between preserving the literal meaning against the rhythm of Sajko’s sentences, a decision that at times relies on “retaining the ‘ghost’ of the word,” which itself seems to perfectly sum up the novel’s own atmospheric closeness.
Ultimately, the density of so intense a narrational technique does indeed communicate, but it aims beyond language, realizing a series of single sentences that express something unmistakably human while steadfastly refusing to take the reader into account. There, perhaps, is an answer to our starting question. Every Time We Say Goodbye stands as a novel that achieves the great trick of accelerating form into content, which is always the best reply to that old fractious query, grumbling about manners. Buzz, buzz.
Every Time We Say Goodbye in Air
Ivana Sajko
Biblioasis
121pp
$22
D. W. White received his PhD in English-Creative Writing from the University of Illinois-Chicago and teaches in the MFA Program at Roosevelt University. His first book, Rachel Cusk & The Art Of Narration, will be released in November by Indirect Books.
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