There are vivid descriptions of daily life, and painful memories of illness and loss, as well as rifts within Ban’s extended family. Ban/Drndić takes aim at Karl Ove Knausgaard’s novels (“absolutely intolerable unless the person reading them is inwardly riddled with holes, full of stale air, so the cultivation of perverse voyeuristic instincts serves to fill up that inner void”), and relates conversations with various contemporaries such as fellow Croatian Goran Ferčec, the Filipino writer Miguel Syjuco and the Ethiopian-American Maaza Mengiste. Yet the novel is not simply a litany of murders and murderers: it has many facets beyond the political. is urgently focused on recording the criminal violence of the 20th century Like much of Drndić’s earlier work, E.E.G.

There are also accounts of victims of the Nazis, from Ban’s uncle’s young love, a violinist, to Joseph Roth’s mentally ill wife, fatally institutionalised in the euthanasia clinic Schloss Hartheim, “the only killing centre in the second world war from which not a single person emerged alive”. The text includes long lists of suicidal chess players, war criminals and notable Latvian celebrities, from Mikhail Baryshnikov to Mark Rothko. “I’m not offering ‘a story’,” Ban tells us, “because I write about people who don’t have ‘a story’, not about those or for those who are looking for other people’s stories in order to find their own in them.” But whereas Bernhard’s novels are of a deliberate, complex and ultimately beautiful artistry, Drndić rebels against the constraints of form on all levels: digressing wildly, inserting lengthy lists, charts and unattributed photographs, mingling wrenching historical fact with gossipy reminiscence and invention. Thomas Bernhard’s influence is inescapable, and the brilliant misanthropic Austrian monologist is referred to more than once. His rambling intensity is alternately exhilarating and intolerable: there is great wisdom, along with dark history, in these pages, for those ready to take on the challenge.ĭrndić imbues Ban with considerable passion, but in spite of his profession does not pause to develop for him a nuanced psychology: rather, he serves apparently as a stand-in for Drndić herself, enabling the hectic, untrammelled hybrid narrative particular to the author. His inner monologue roves across space and time, as intent on (real) forgotten sins of the second world war as on the biographies of his former patients, or family history, or (real) contemporary writers. Ban is a retired psychologist and sometime émigré to Canada now returned to the country of his youth.

He is the narrator, also, of Drndić’s acclaimed earlier novel Belladonna, published last year. A ndreas Ban is the blistering narrator of the Croatian writer Daša Drndić’s final novel, E.E.G., now published posthumously in English ( Drndić died of lung cancer in June).

Belladonna daša drndić