Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko

Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simić is published by V&Q Books

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god

It’s fucking beautiful stuff

a short, punchy, tight novella that touches on essentially every idea that matters, that could matter, that touches us all…

a follow up to the incredible, unputdownable and (for me) deeply romantic in its tragedy Love Novel, Every Time We Say Goodbye is a new translation by Mima Simić of Ivana Sajko’s 2024 novel, originally titled, Male smirti, which literally translates as Little Deaths.

I think the choice to not use this original title was likely an easy one to make, as although this is an episodic novel with each chapter functioning as a piece of single sentence stream-of-consciousness flash fiction, they are far more about mortality and loss and separation than they are about what certainly comes to my mind when I hear the phrase “little deaths” (i.e. orgasms).

This is a book about goodbyes, about separations, about the creation and the existence of distance, of distancing, of loss, of the loss of loss itself, of the end of love, of abuse, of war, of death, of more war, of state violence, of creativity, of ambition, of failure, of the beginning of love, of priorities and boundaries and their erasure… of hope, of optimism, of belief and happiness and need, but it’s also about depression and addiction and loss and loss and loss…

Each chapter is, loosely, the thoughts and memories of a man somewhere in middle age, a journalist and activist who has long acquiesced into middle-aged apathy, his career and his work stalling, his romantic life a slow decaying mess… he has left his long term partner and is now on his way, by train, from an unnamed coastal spot in the South Mediterranean to Berlin, where a decade ago he could have moved with ease, yet is doing so, now, when it may be [nearly] too late…

He reflects on his childhood with an abusive, alcoholic father, and the years he and his elder brother spent living with their grandmother while their mother worked in a German factory and built a new life there, sending back presents and money, before returning herself when her own mother died…

In youth, the chaos of the Yugoslavian Civil War collapses everything around the family, and his brother gets involved in petty organised crime and eventually runs away, internationally, long out of reach of a protagonist who as he grows allows relationships to collapse, even the ones he cares about, or wants to care about…

He lived with his mother until he moved in with his long term partner, who met him as a crusading progressive journalistic voice and activist, yet eventually eventually eventually the dream[s] died but the relationship didn’t, though a final, broken, breaking, scene towards the book’s end shows the crossing of the line of forgivability that was unspoken before and explains, sort of, why this journey is happening [now], rather than not at all…

He yearns, as he travels and thinks, for the world and for his life to not be how it is…

He reflects on breaches of human rights he witnessed in person, and of those he saw on film…

He thinks about film and literature and art and politics. He thinks and he feels and he reflects and he acknowledges his own faults and he sees where these copy those of his parents and where they peel apart…

He is someone broken by stasis, someone who has rotted into their own unsteady and unhappy adulthood and it has caused him to act in ways he had hoped to never act.

It’s familiar, in some ways, achingly familiar, and it hurts to see where this apathy, this failure to grow, can lead if left unchecked… Every act and action is believable and tightly wrought. People here are not simply unrounded, uncomplex… it’s a work of fiction about “real” people, not a horror story or a romance… the darkness that’s here is a very human darkness, responding and reappearing in response to cycles, cycles, cycles of darkness that happened before…

People tell you, people say, that compromise is the mark of maturity, but when a life is centred around and limited by the compromises that are made as a part of it and they become, no, not its parts, but the entirety, the fullness, of a life…  when compromise is all there is, and all there is, is compromise… it’s unsustainable.

Yes.

It’s a beautiful novel. Sajko’s prose, in its translation by Simić, is wise, smooth, cutting…

Sentences run the length of chapters and themes and ideas do, too, but the whole connects each idea and neatly (surely effortfully in planning, yet effortlessly in effect) it all coalesces…

In a little over 100 pages, we have the entirety of a life…

Its peaks, its troughs, yes, but more importantly than that we have its wholeness… who and where and how it is, what it is, why why why…

Why and how errors recur, what stifles, what stops, what meanders and why…

It’s haunting, it’s catastrophic… it’s pedestrian, it’s quotidien… it’s fucking life, dammit, it’s humanity and personhood in its flawed, its flawed, its flawed whole…

It’s a fucking beautiful novel and I loved every page.

Yes I did. An absolute fucking treat.

Someone translate more Sajko soon, please!!!

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I was lucky enough to receive a pre-release copy of this from V&Q Books, and it was an absolute joy to receive something as excellent as this.

Publishers and writers, I will gush positively about your books sometimes! But if – and only if – I think they deserve it!

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Sentences I underlined while reading the first chapter:

“my hangovers caused by depression; my depression caused by failure, boredom, provincial life and a lack of talent to turn my misery into a masterpiece” (p. 13-14)

“no one but me missed the books I have not written” (p. 14)

“she stared into their interiors decorated with books and pictures where they planned to live forever, as opposed to our neglected rooms that tacitly counted on our transience” (p. 15)

I stopped underlining sentences at this point as I realised I’d end up underlining the majority of the book.

Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simić is published by V&Q Books