Back when I used to host online book events – when I felt closest to being a ‘like and subscribe!’ kind of person, and boy did I not love that feeling – I helped run an event on a coffee table book about a fancy European writing retreat. My job, generally, was to set up the tech, hit record, sometimes give a (perfunctory) introduction, field questions for the authors (or make them up if (when) we weren’t getting any), and then wrap things up at the end. Remember to buy a copy of the books, folks! And no, your friendly bookseller isn’t getting paid anything extra for this, goodnight! In any case, I had to monitor these events as they happened in case the connection failed, and had to generally pay attention in order to make up questions if (when) no questions came in, so I caught all of this event about said European retreat. The guests were two somewhat prominent American authors who had been at the retreat at the same time, and they spent most of the event talking about how pleasant it was to be at the retreat, eating nice meals and learning more about their fellow writers, and what an incredible experience it was having a beautiful space and a Room of One’s Own (and With a View) in order to just write. Everyone in their cohort, they said, had had a dream time at the retreat; everyone, that is, besides Daša Drndić. Drndić, the Croatian writer who passed in 2018, had apparently not enjoyed her time at the retreat, let everyone know about it, and then, in the mandated reflection she had to write about her experience for the retreat’s website, described it as: “a killer of thoughts, a leech of the spirit, a thief of worlds and dreams.”1 The two Americans kind of danced around this and laughed it off, as if Drndić was the only person in the world who could find the hills of Tuscany disagreeable, and they quickly moved along to nicer subjects altogether.

Drndić’s work is an antidote to niceness and cheap nostalgia and what we might call historical amnesia. There’s so much evil in the world that she can’t forget it, not even in the toniest of environs. The narrator of her final novel, EEG, is Andreas Ban, a Croatian writer who traverses Europe in the glasses from They Live, but instead of seeing Carpenter’s alien invaders everywhere, Andreas Ban sees fascists everywhere. In every corner of Europe, unfailingly, there is a reminder of the monstrous work of fascists, especially the Holocaust, and if Andreas finds a place not tainted by the memory of the Nazis or the more local Ustaša, the various dictators of postwar Eastern Europe are there to pick up the slack. Croatia is a particularly bad spot for this kind of psychogeography, given that it’s been seemingly bombed or invaded from within and without for the last 100 years or so. EEG continues the story of Drndić’s penultimate novel Belladonna, wherein Andreas Ban is driven to attempt suicide by the unrelenting weight of tragedies both personal and historical. Ban triumphantly announces “Of course I didn’t kill myself” at the beginning of EEG and then proceeds to get right back to his work of remembering the horrors of the past. No days off, even after a not-quite-fatal dose of nightshade.