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arirang 's review for:
Catherine the Great and the Small
by Olja Knežević
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/