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.

Every Time We Say Goodbye is a novel about departures, about childhood, about the end of love and about the lost idea of ​​escaping to a better place. Each chapter is one long sentence that moves from the past to the present, from the skin of a frightened boy to the suit of an adult man, from one end of Europe to the other, following the fate of a man who travels from a coastal town on the Adriatic to Berlin in order to start again.

The reader joins the narrator on his journey, both on the train and in his mind--from disjointed memories triggered by his departure from home, through attempts to put his relationships and experiences in some kind of order to find meaning in them and perhaps assign blame, to confronting his most painful memories--finally arriving with him at his destination with a sense of clarity and the possibility of a new beginning. Ivana Sajko paints a portrait of an intellectual at a crossroads with stylistic care and precision.

Review Quotes

Praise for Every Time We Say Goodbye

"[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 is a writer, theatre director, and performer working in the overlapping fields of literature, performance art and music. The author of four acclaimed novels and dozens of political theatre pieces, among which Woman-bomb gained international success, she is the four-time winner of a national playwriting award as well as the French Chevalier Medal of Arts and Letters, the Ivan Goran Kovačic Prize for best debut novel, and Internationales Literaturpreis. A contributor to Die Zeit, she lives in Berlin with her son.

Mima Simic is a writer, film critic, translator, and LGBTIQ+ activist. She holds degrees in comparative literature, English language and literature, and gender studies, and was Croatia's first openly LGBTIQ+ political candidate.