The BookBlast 10x10 Tour: Istros Books in Nottingham

The End of the World? How the Balkans writes the Holocaust

Focusing on the up-coming novel by the highly-praised Croatian writer, Daša Drndić, DOPPELGANGER and the recently published HOUSE OF REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING by Filip David, which has garnered rave reviews in the Jewish Chroncile and the LA Review of Books.

Publisher and translator, Susan Curtis of Istros Books, will be in conversation with veteran translator from the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Christina Pribićević-Zorić, appraising the work of these two seminal post WWII authors - one from the East and one from the West of the former Yugoslavia - and how they chose to represent the sins of the past through fragmentary, atmospheric novels that confront the reader with uncomfortable questions of culpability and the temptation to forget.


Reviews for THE HOUSE OF REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING:

'This is a profound book, immense in its wisdom and courage, and it demands to be read several times. At its huge heart remains the image of the little boy — distantly related to none other than the famous escape artist Houdini — thrust out into the snow. . . So many questions, so few answers, and always the haunting sound of a train. Devotedly and painstakingly, Filip David probes our communal bewilderment, as well as the fate of Serbian Jews in particular.'

The Los Angeles Review of Books

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'Filip David's question, then, remains open: how are we to understand evil, if at all? While he ventures no answer, by maintaining an unflinching gaze towards this fundamanetal, existential conundrum, he has written a masterly book. It meshes a rigorous intelligence. . . with an eerie exploration of "the corridors and labyrinths of many criss-crossing worlds."'

'A masterly book written with rigorous intelligence.'

- Richard Berengarten, The Jewish Chronicle



Praise for Daša Drndić:

“The capacity to see the bricolage of a reticent, morally compromised, elegiac past—and, more unsettlingly, how that past might see us—is a central feature of the work of the Croatian writer Dasa Drndic.”

- Dustin Illingworth,  Paris Review

‘Drndić is relentless; her righteousness is passionate. Human anguish seeps from the pages, yet her writing proves unexpectedly exhilarating.’

- Eileen Battersby, LA Review of Books