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3.76 AVERAGE
3.76 AVERAGE
emotional
funny
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
My thanks to the publisher for the free review copy!
Earlier this month I made a little visit to Montenegro, with Catherine the Great and the Small by Olja Knežević, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać and Paula Gordon. This is another fascinating title from Istros Books, who focus on publishing works from South Eastern Europe and the Balkans! I'm always fascinated by an insight into a new country's history, and Montenegro was no exception.
Earlier this month I made a little visit to Montenegro, with Catherine the Great and the Small by Olja Knežević, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać and Paula Gordon. This is another fascinating title from Istros Books, who focus on publishing works from South Eastern Europe and the Balkans! I'm always fascinated by an insight into a new country's history, and Montenegro was no exception.
.
Catherine the Great and the Small takes place from the eighties to the present day. I liked the way it was split in two, with part one set in Montenegro when the capital was still known as Titograd, part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and part two moving forwards in time when Titograd became Podgorica. It was a totally new culture and history to me, and thankfully I had flicked to the end at the start of reading and found some very interesting background information as well as an extremely handy pronunciation guide! That may have been better off at the front, as I definitely found my reading experience improved from reading it beforehand.
.
The story follows Katarina, from a young girl to a grown woman. I thought the two sections were quite distinct, and I very much preferred part one, Catherine the Small. I loved reading about Katarina's childhood, coming of age in a socialist country, her intense friendship with Mici. The second part sees Katarina move to London with her husband and children. Usually I love domestic narratives, and I can't quite put my finger on what happened to lessen my enjoyment here. Maybe Katarina's ongoing passion for her ex-boyfriend was a bit too soapy and melodramatic. Either way, it's not bad by any means, and the strong first half and the female relationships within the novel more than makes up for it.
.
This book is another good example of an author doing a fine balancing act between a personal story and a political history. Although we're focused on Katarina's trajectory, the shifting politics of her country are always playing out in the background. I'd say the personal definitely outweighs the political, but it was a fascinating little glimpse into life in Montenegro which I would like to learn more about!
Content Warnings
Moderate: Addiction, Cancer, Drug use, Infidelity, Rape, Sexual violence, Suicide
Minor: Pedophilia
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I discovered "Catherine the Great and the Small," by Olja Knezevic, on Twitter, thanks to Women in Translation Month, a month I usually just call "August." It spurred me to pick up and read a number of translated books by women writers that had been sitting on my shelves unread; after reading some short reviews of "Catherine," I ordered this book, which is beautifully written, powerfully drawn yet prickly.
"Catherine the Great and the Small" opens in the summer of 1978, when Catherine "the small" is playing "guerillas and gendarmes" with her friends in the back alleys of Titograd (now Podgorica), the capital of Montenegro, then part of Communist Yugoslavia and named for Josip Broz Tito, the President of Yugoslavia from 1953 to 1980. It seems like a carefree summer, until Catherine's mother, an artist and art teacher, dies of cancer in the opening pages.
From then on Catherine is raised by her formidable Granny, the widow of a partisan who fought with Tito during World War II. It is Granny who offers stability and guidance to Catherine as she navigates her teenage and young adult years with her best friend Milica, a talented aspiring actress who descends into a drug-addled existence after moving to Belgrade for drama school.
Catherine is a model student, studying economics in Belgrade, when the breakdown of Yugoslavia, under the leadership of Slobodan Milošević (later charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with war crimes in connection to the wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo) begins to intrude. Much of the story takes place in the backdrop of this war, as Catherine's friends are conscripted or flee the country. Catherine herself struggles to retain some nugget of happiness in the midst of the madness; working in a department store in Titograd, she arranges for Milica to appear in an advertising campaign for Italian shoes. The billboards survive Milica and seem like a metaphor for the ruined Yugoslavia:
"The advertising posters and the first billboards in town - with Milica's lovely figure, stretching contentedly on the beach, on the grass, on the parquet floor, surrounded by shoes and sandals - faded and began looking like a cruel joke, a sad reminder of the many possibilities for which we were still too backwards, unprepared.
Our country was coming apart at the seams from an illness whose cause I didn't understand."
Catherine survives this trauma and others: She makes a life for herself as a writer and a mother, now Catherine "the Great," because, as Milica says, "In the depths of your existence you find light. Waiting for you at the very bottom is this tiny glowing ball and you take it in your hands and bring it to the surface. You're a mermaid, but not me."
"Catherine the Great and the Small" opens in the summer of 1978, when Catherine "the small" is playing "guerillas and gendarmes" with her friends in the back alleys of Titograd (now Podgorica), the capital of Montenegro, then part of Communist Yugoslavia and named for Josip Broz Tito, the President of Yugoslavia from 1953 to 1980. It seems like a carefree summer, until Catherine's mother, an artist and art teacher, dies of cancer in the opening pages.
From then on Catherine is raised by her formidable Granny, the widow of a partisan who fought with Tito during World War II. It is Granny who offers stability and guidance to Catherine as she navigates her teenage and young adult years with her best friend Milica, a talented aspiring actress who descends into a drug-addled existence after moving to Belgrade for drama school.
Catherine is a model student, studying economics in Belgrade, when the breakdown of Yugoslavia, under the leadership of Slobodan Milošević (later charged by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) with war crimes in connection to the wars in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo) begins to intrude. Much of the story takes place in the backdrop of this war, as Catherine's friends are conscripted or flee the country. Catherine herself struggles to retain some nugget of happiness in the midst of the madness; working in a department store in Titograd, she arranges for Milica to appear in an advertising campaign for Italian shoes. The billboards survive Milica and seem like a metaphor for the ruined Yugoslavia:
"The advertising posters and the first billboards in town - with Milica's lovely figure, stretching contentedly on the beach, on the grass, on the parquet floor, surrounded by shoes and sandals - faded and began looking like a cruel joke, a sad reminder of the many possibilities for which we were still too backwards, unprepared.
Our country was coming apart at the seams from an illness whose cause I didn't understand."
Catherine survives this trauma and others: She makes a life for herself as a writer and a mother, now Catherine "the Great," because, as Milica says, "In the depths of your existence you find light. Waiting for you at the very bottom is this tiny glowing ball and you take it in your hands and bring it to the surface. You're a mermaid, but not me."
We each sit on the clean soft grass of our new countries, alone. Alone in a crowd, alone even when we're with our new friends, who don't hear the roar of the wild mounting inside us. Always at the start of summer we pine for the pungent smell of home. Our new cities smell like overstocked department stores, eastern spices or smog. We are called back by the selfish pergola whose heavycloying smell fills our nostrils while we shoo away thirsty wasps. And the grape vines, dry and anorexic, untended, left to the mercy of the elements, but with a fragrance so piercing, smelling of sugar on the verge of ferment. Pine needles and wild plums, beaten down by the crazy sun; on the chapped earth, crushed mulberries; next to them, dusty plastic beach shoes.
Catherine the Great and the Small has been translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać and Paula Gordon from Olja Knežević's Montenegrin original, Katarina, Velika i Mala. The author introduces the novel here: https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2020/06/15/interview-with-olja-knezevic-author-of-catherine-the-great-and-the-small/
The book is published by one of my favourite publishers, Istros Books. who have done a wonderful job in bringing high quality literature from the Balkans and SE Europe to English speaking readers. Founder Susan Curtis explains the press's mission and how she came to publish this novel here: http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2020/06/08/interview-with-susan-curtis/
The novel is narrated by Katarina and begins I am Catherine the Great, hiding away in a small office, the sobriquet one of many bestowed on her during the novel by relatives and friends, and the location London, and the home she shares with her estranged husband.
She then takes us back in the first section, Catherine the Small, to her early years, from childhood through to early adulthood, in what was then Titograd in Yugoslavia, where she was born in the 1970s, the novel opening in 1978 with Boney M riding high in the charts. It is a turbulent tale, her childhood friend in particular caught up in drug addiction and then sexually exploitated.
It ends with Katarina meeting Vuksan, a rather more reliable, if dull, man than those she has mostly fallen in love with during her turbulent youth. With nationalism rising, and the country on the verge of civil war, he proposes emigrating, and her beloved Granny tells her I'll rest easier knowing you're in a safe place, far from the insanity that will run rampant in the streets.
The second section of the novel, Catherine the Great, set some time later (closer to the present day), after she and Vuksan have settled in London, with three children. Their relationship has deteriorated, and Katarina returns for the first time in some years to her hometown - now returned to its original name of Podgorica in Montenego - for her Granny's funeral, where her children and eventually Vuksan later join her, and she catches up on what has happened to her friends, and discovers some revelations about what really occured years ago.
The translators are a rather super-star team who explained their approach and how they worked together in this interview: https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2020/06/22/interview-paula-gordon-ellen-elias-bursac/
This is a novel that actually acquires an extra dimension in translation, in that it gives the English-speaking reader insight into a different world, and a particular, and turbulent, time and place, namely the transition in Yugoslavia from a socialist Republic, almost uniquely non-aligned between the East and western blocs, to the break-up and civil war, and the transition to a more capitalist society. But the novel does this very naturally via Katarina's story.
Even the most acclaimed historical fiction can have a tendency for significant people, events or years to be led out on stage, their identity proclaimed loudly in case one misses any allusion , which is a trap that this novel neatly avoids.
And what, to an English reader, might otherwise be lost, Paula Gordon and Ellen Elias-Bursać, restore with deft glosses and a brief afterword, avoiding the need for footnotes
As for the style of the novel, comparisons in reviews are , I admit, lazy and reductive , but can be helpful to post signpost readers and also draw out differences . And there was certainly enough in common - the intensity, the strong female voices, the emotional investment of the reader in the characters, the portrayal of long-term female friendships and romantic relationships - to regard this as a Montenegrin Ferrante. That said Catherine the Great and the Small has a:
- more significant geo-political canvas - the collapse of Communism and the Yugoslav state followed by civil war;
- world where exile doesn’t just mean leaving the neighborhood and the city, but the country ( to the US, Canada and, for the narrator, the UK);
- more focused cast of characters , with depth priotised over breadth . This is also a novel narrated by and centered on Katarina, and the account of her acquaintances' lives are those she witnessed or could discover (cf Ferrante 's use of narrative devices such as discovery of a notebook );
- less use of the Ferrantian frame-by-frame analysis (e.g. the wedding scene that ends book 1 and begins book 2 of the Neopolitan tetrology), with here the narrator more realistically looking back from many years in the future;
- and as a result, a more compact, although still very deep, and perhaps even more intense, novel.
Recommended
Other reviews which each bring out different aspects of the novel:
https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/11867/catherine-the-great-and-the-small-olja-knezevic-north-macedonia-literature-migrant-fragmented-identity
https://www.scottishreview.net/MorelleSmith529a.html
https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/europe/montenegro/olja-knezevic/catherine-great-and-small/
Catherine the Great and the Small has been translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać and Paula Gordon from Olja Knežević's Montenegrin original, Katarina, Velika i Mala. The author introduces the novel here: https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2020/06/15/interview-with-olja-knezevic-author-of-catherine-the-great-and-the-small/
The book is published by one of my favourite publishers, Istros Books. who have done a wonderful job in bringing high quality literature from the Balkans and SE Europe to English speaking readers. Founder Susan Curtis explains the press's mission and how she came to publish this novel here: http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2020/06/08/interview-with-susan-curtis/
The novel is narrated by Katarina and begins I am Catherine the Great, hiding away in a small office, the sobriquet one of many bestowed on her during the novel by relatives and friends, and the location London, and the home she shares with her estranged husband.
She then takes us back in the first section, Catherine the Small, to her early years, from childhood through to early adulthood, in what was then Titograd in Yugoslavia, where she was born in the 1970s, the novel opening in 1978 with Boney M riding high in the charts. It is a turbulent tale, her childhood friend in particular caught up in drug addiction and then sexually exploitated.
It ends with Katarina meeting Vuksan, a rather more reliable, if dull, man than those she has mostly fallen in love with during her turbulent youth. With nationalism rising, and the country on the verge of civil war, he proposes emigrating, and her beloved Granny tells her I'll rest easier knowing you're in a safe place, far from the insanity that will run rampant in the streets.
The second section of the novel, Catherine the Great, set some time later (closer to the present day), after she and Vuksan have settled in London, with three children. Their relationship has deteriorated, and Katarina returns for the first time in some years to her hometown - now returned to its original name of Podgorica in Montenego - for her Granny's funeral, where her children and eventually Vuksan later join her, and she catches up on what has happened to her friends, and discovers some revelations about what really occured years ago.
The translators are a rather super-star team who explained their approach and how they worked together in this interview: https://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/translatingwomen/2020/06/22/interview-paula-gordon-ellen-elias-bursac/
This is a novel that actually acquires an extra dimension in translation, in that it gives the English-speaking reader insight into a different world, and a particular, and turbulent, time and place, namely the transition in Yugoslavia from a socialist Republic, almost uniquely non-aligned between the East and western blocs, to the break-up and civil war, and the transition to a more capitalist society. But the novel does this very naturally via Katarina's story.
Even the most acclaimed historical fiction can have a tendency for significant people, events or years to be led out on stage, their identity proclaimed loudly in case one misses any allusion , which is a trap that this novel neatly avoids.
And what, to an English reader, might otherwise be lost, Paula Gordon and Ellen Elias-Bursać, restore with deft glosses and a brief afterword, avoiding the need for footnotes
As for the style of the novel, comparisons in reviews are , I admit, lazy and reductive , but can be helpful to post signpost readers and also draw out differences . And there was certainly enough in common - the intensity, the strong female voices, the emotional investment of the reader in the characters, the portrayal of long-term female friendships and romantic relationships - to regard this as a Montenegrin Ferrante. That said Catherine the Great and the Small has a:
- more significant geo-political canvas - the collapse of Communism and the Yugoslav state followed by civil war;
- world where exile doesn’t just mean leaving the neighborhood and the city, but the country ( to the US, Canada and, for the narrator, the UK);
- more focused cast of characters , with depth priotised over breadth . This is also a novel narrated by and centered on Katarina, and the account of her acquaintances' lives are those she witnessed or could discover (cf Ferrante 's use of narrative devices such as discovery of a notebook );
- less use of the Ferrantian frame-by-frame analysis (e.g. the wedding scene that ends book 1 and begins book 2 of the Neopolitan tetrology), with here the narrator more realistically looking back from many years in the future;
- and as a result, a more compact, although still very deep, and perhaps even more intense, novel.
Recommended
Other reviews which each bring out different aspects of the novel:
https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/11867/catherine-the-great-and-the-small-olja-knezevic-north-macedonia-literature-migrant-fragmented-identity
https://www.scottishreview.net/MorelleSmith529a.html
https://www.themodernnovel.org/europe/europe/montenegro/olja-knezevic/catherine-great-and-small/
adventurous
emotional
funny
sad
fast-paced
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes