[Istros Books; 2024]

Tr. from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer

In Zagreb’s Lower Town, at a busy intersection of streets named after four Medieval Croatian noblemen, lies a stately square of neatly manicured grass that has gone by many names. First, it was known simply as Square N. Then, in 1927, the square was renamed after Peter I, King of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. It was during this time that the square was endowed with its iconic limestone pavilion, designed by sculptor Ivan Meštrović, which would go on to serve variously as a museum, a mosque, and an exhibition space. In 1941, it briefly became Square III, until it was renamed once again for a Medieval Croatian viceroy under the Nazi puppet state that seized control during World War II. After the victory of Tito’s Partisans, it was renamed the Square of Victims of Fascism in 1946. This name stuck—until Yugoslavia began to come apart, and it was renamed the Croatian Nobles Square in 1990. Through its name alone, the square bears silent witness to twentieth-century Croatia.

Place names, monuments, and textbooks serve as repositories of history—but less in the Hegelian sense of teleological linearity and more as a record of the competing ideologies of the past. The renaming of the square in 1990 reflected mounting Croatian nationalism and calls to erase all signs of the country’s Yugoslav heritage, including its anti-fascism. But this, at least, was recognized as excessive, and a new government in 2001 rechristened it the Square of Victims of Fascism, which it remains today. History has a tendency of seeming settled—until, all at once, it isn’t. Lidija Dimkovska’s new novel, Grandma Non-Oui, published by Istros Books and translated from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer, explores how history mirrors human life itself: complex, recursive, non-linear, and defiantly inconclusive.  

Drawing on similar themes to Dimkovska’s earlier novel, A Spare Life, which detailed the story of conjoined twin sisters growing up in the final years of Yugoslavia, Grandma Non-Oui imagines personal history as inseparable from political history. The novel is primarily narrated by Neda, the granddaughter and namesake of Grandma Nedjeljka, known as Grandma Non-Oui (from the French version of Neda: “ne” meaning “no” and “da” meaning “yes” in Croatian). Growing up in a small town in Sicily, Neda develops a special bond with her grandmother. She is the only one in the family who is taught her grandmother’s native Croatian. “She talked to me and I swallowed up new words,” Neda explains. She is enthralled by her grandmother’s stories of her youth in Split and her emigration to Sicily after meeting her Italian husband. The novel lurches between time periods as Grandma Non-Oui’s life unfolds over the course of the twentieth century, retold by Grandma Non-Oui as lived memories and by Neda as family stories.  

Neda seeks to understand her family’s past and heritage through her grandmother’s stories, having long stood out for her unusual name in Sicily. In the novel’s present, Grandma Non-Oui has passed away, but Neda keeps their conversation alive: “I am sitting by her grave and I’m telling her all this and I know that she’s listening attentively to me, waiting for me to fall silent and then she’ll say something back.” In her grandmother’s absence, Neda has become the primary keeper of her memories. The narration alternates between Grandma Non-Oui and Neda, who has heard her stories so many times that they have become her own. Their perspectives intertwine throughout the chapters, as if to confuse the reader about who is speaking. At times, the narration seems to mistakenly mix the two up. The ensuing stories unspool in long, uninterrupted paragraphs that blur the past and present together, suggesting the eternal return of history.

Grandma Non-Oui’s story begins at the onset of World War II in Split as the city first falls under Italian occupation, before eventually passing under German control. She grows up with her parents and brother Krsto, but the war marks a cleavage in their lives: “We had no present, just air raids, and every thought was about hunger, poverty, and misery.” She takes to sewing clothes for Tito’s Partisan troops, who have commenced their guerilla campaign against the occupying forces. When she finds out that Krsto has been earning food by singing to the occupying Italian troops, their relationship—never harmonious to begin with—comes under added strain. It breaks for good after she falls in love with an Italian soldier who once beat up Krsto.

After Italy capitulates, that same Italian soldier, Carlo, joins the anti-fascist Garibaldi Brigades to fight for Yugoslavia’s freedom. When the war finally ends, Carlo and Grandma Non-Oui find each other, and she joins him back home in Sicily. But emigration brings its own sadness. One of very few immigrants in a small Sicilian town overtaken by mafia violence, she is left to confront a “reality of fear, loneliness, and not belonging.” She raises three sons and only ever returns to Split twice in the ensuing decades, which rush by in far fewer pages than the earlier chapters set during World War II. Dimkovska’s prose blends the gossipy reportage of family lore with the world-weary sagacity of advanced age, as when Grandma Non-Oui explains her unwillingness to return to Split: “When you no longer live somewhere, you’re dead to that place. And when a dead person returns to where she was once alive, it is as a ghost.”

The wars of Yugoslav dissolution in the 1990s reawaken many of Grandma Non-Oui’s memories of the past, as if history were repeating itself. As they watch the news together, Neda imagines “that it must be the same there as it had been during the second world war, during the time of your war.” In her final years, after her husband’s death and the onset of Alzheimer’s, Grandma Non-Oui’s memories begin to fade away. Two of her sons have left Sicily for Trieste and Rome, and it falls to Neda to absorb her stories before they are lost: “I prompted her to talk, to retell her stories, to recall everything that had marked her past.” Towards the end, Grandma Non-Oui even forgets Italian, and only Neda can translate: “The foreigner becomes a foreigner once again.”

Dimkovska is a consummate storyteller, and the novel unfolds as one long saga told by one generation to the next. As such, it is reminiscent of other novels about the relaying of memories between generations, such as Liliana Corobca’s Too Great a Sky or Fotini Tsalikoglou’s The Secret Sister. The narrative logic of Grandma Non-Oui is, in effect, the recounting of Grandma Non-Oui’s life story. And so, after she dies, the narrative—like Neda herself—at first seems devoid of purpose. Neda’s present is shaped less by grand romance or war and more by her job at a bookstore in Palermo and casual hookups: “I only know meaningless sex, most often with myself, if I don’t count sleeping with men at drunken parties on the bay.” Like many of her friends, Neda dreams of travel and feels ambivalent about starting a family. “I don’t know what happened to my generation,” she laments. 

The past, represented by Grandma Non-Oui, is conceived as more fully-lived than Neda’s present: “Her life left more memories than three of my lives ever could.” While it’s true that Neda has been spared much of the violence and trauma that her grandmother endured, she risks shortchanging herself, as if her life—any life—can be less meaningful. As a result, her perspective can at times verge on caricature: “To tell you the truth, I’ve seduced two or three of the men I’ve made love to, I even just up and asked one of them if he wanted to do it with no strings attached. The world in which we live has changed.” This has the ring of someone a great deal older parodying a millennial—but perhaps this is because Neda has imbibed the voice of her beloved Grandma Non-Oui. 

Still, considering her life “empty and aimless,” Neda decides to visit Split, the city of so many stories, seeking to rediscover her grandmother in her home city. But there she finds that history and the stories of her grandmother are far from over: “They’re raising fascist monuments and destroying Partisan ones . . . in today’s Croatia, no one wants to recall the time of the Second World War when the Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians were one and fought together.” Swastikas have begun to appear on buildings, and in Italy, too, immigration has triggered a xenophobic backlash: “Fascism is returning to Europe. Perhaps it never disappeared.” In the final pages, Neda’s dull present grows subsumed by the violent reverberations of the past. For history, like human lives, defies narrative logic. One thing happens, and then the next. Things may go forward or backward, recur or rupture. And so Grandma Non-Oui’s story is history itself, where the personal and political are forever intertwined. Such are the stories we pass along. 

Eamon McGrath is a writer currently based in Brooklyn. He writes about literature from Southeastern Europe on Instagram @balkanbooks. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and the Chicago Review of Books, among other places.


 
 
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