Every Time We Say Goodbye - (Biblioasis International Translation) by Ivana Sajko (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition and failure--Ivana Sajko paints a portrait of an intellectual at a crossroads.

A man on a train, propelled from a small town on the south-eastern coast of Europe to Berlin. As the wheels turn, his mind feverishly clacks along, tracing his own past--and that of Europe--to a moment of violence he must flee, moving him further and farther away from the one person he loves.

Shipwrecks and border pushbacks; epidemics and industrial ruins; a family separated by economic necessity; a brother lost to crime; love and fear and memories of happier times in Berlin--yet through it all runs a silver thread of hope spun by a far-off friend. Every Time We Say Goodbye is an extended soliloquy of self-examination, upheaval, loss, hope, disillusionment, ambition, and failure, and is a profoundly stark and furious novel.

Review Quotes

Praise for Every Time We Say Goodbye

"Readers familiar with Sajko's Love Novel will remember the author's long, absorbing stream-of-consciousness sentences. In Every Time We Say Goodbye, every chapter is a single sentence running for pages. The translator, Mima Simic, approaches her task inventively . . . the prose flows in sync with the protagonist's thoughts: now rolling along, now jolting on the tracks, now braking hard."
--Anna Aslanyan, Times Literary Supplement

"[A] captivating new novel . . . 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 and the continent's."
--Ken Kalfus, New York Times

"Sajko's prose--in Mimi Simic's artful translation--sharpens and resounds with deeply wrung emotion."
--Regan Mies, Asymptote

"Every sentence sings with emotional resonance and is imbued with the protagonist's regret. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a master class in both economy of language and expansiveness of feeling."
--Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature

"The form suits the novel's action, which involves a disillusioned Croatian journalist travelling by train to Berlin, where he reflects on a Europe in crisis, personal trauma and the losses that have left him alienated from his work, past and sense of belonging."
--Emily Donaldson, Globe and Mail

"Sajko vividly captures the way in which travel suspends both time and place in scenes that are at once real and dreamlike . . . evoking generations of exile and migration, the inevitable aftershock of the wars and purges that have defined the Balkans. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a threnody to leave-taking--elegant, mournful, and profoundly human."
--Frank Wynne, Irish Times

"However grim the subject matter, the writing remains exceptionally good, with long, majestic sentences that curl unpredictably around the subject. This profound novel is superbly translated by Simic, whose translator's note is in itself fascinating."
--Declan O'Driscoll, Irish Times

"The relentless nature of the narrative style heightens the emotional intensity of this novel, allowing for an in depth portrait of one man's past and present to emerge in a relatively limited space."
--Joseph Schreiber, roughghosts

"Propulsive . . . Mima Simic translates all of this with clarity and verve . . . The recalled episodes throughout are alternately riveting and heartbreaking."
--Ron Slate, On The Seawall

"A darkly meditative work from a strong and unflinching voice."
--Kirkus Reviews

"Sajko's blackhearted modernist novel is worth a look."
--Publishers Weekly

"Translated by Mima Simic, Sajko's longtime translator, the words in Every Time We Say Goodbye flow on the page like a river in springtime, so natural and powerful that readers might not realize they weren't written in English. The sombre spirit is captured, the despair relayed, yet for all its bleakness this is not a depressing book . . . The river taking the reader this far has an energizing effect."
--Pamela Hensley, The Miramichi Reader

"[Sajko's] characteristic style resonates throughout the text in rapid changes of condensed scenes, concise and emotionally charged literary clusters of a confident pen for whom prose is always a measured experiment of rapids and explosions."
--Ana Fazekas

Praise for Love Novel

"A devastating book, humane, original, and deeply relevant."
--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A sharp and claustrophobic portrait of a fraying marriage . . . Sajko never takes her foot off the gas in this potent and incendiary outing."
--Publisher's Weekly

"Sajko takes no prisoners . . . [Love Novel] gloriously marries sociopolitical commentary on failed capitalism in a failed state to the inevitability of failed marriage, locating the narrative in an extraordinary violence of mind and body . . . Matching form with content, it depicts lives that involve walking constantly on tightropes with a ferocity of prose that allows no breathing space, consummately conveying the claustrophobic existence of the characters as external as well as personal circumstances close in on them."
--Dublin Literary Award Judges' Citation

"Love Novel is a universal story about passion and poverty that's told in rich language."
--Suzanne Kamata, Foreword Reviews

"Love Novel is not a comfortable read, but it is a timely exploration of socio-economic inequality, a raw confrontation of the pain humans are capable of inflicting on one another, and a fearless engagement with the challenges of poverty and parenthood."
--Helen Vassallo, Reading in Translation

About the Author

Ivana Sajko, born in Zagreb in 1975, is a writer, theatre director and performer, working in the overlapping fields of literature, performance art and music. She is an author of five highly-praised novels and dozens of political theatre pieces, among which Woman-bomb gained international success. Her many awards include the Chevalier de l'ordre des Arts et Lettres and the HKW Internationaler Literaturpreis. She lives in Berlin.

Mima Simic is a Croatian writer, an award-winning film critic, translator and political activist. Her short stories have been included in numerous anthologies and have been adapted for radio, TV and animated film. Her translations include works of fiction, non-fiction, literary theory, screenplays and films. She lives and works in Berlin.