EVERY TIME WE SAY GOODBYE

A disillusioned journalist leaves the Balkans for Berlin in this short novel by award winning Croatian author and theater director Sajko.

A narrator referred to once, in a text, as Iv. looks out the train window as he leaves the Croatian coastline behind. An intellectual, he’s long been part of a minority “constantly invoking a better tomorrow as the majority zeroed in on the shitty today.” Europe is in crisis and the Balkans under pressure; when the train stops for track repairs, passengers immediately blame “the fucking migrants.” As in Sajko’s earlier work, the characters here are firmly caught within their historical moment. Both Iv. and his translator girlfriend watch their work dry up while their expenses rise. Iv. relives a traumatizing disaster he witnessed when police fired on unarmed migrants suffocating in a train car. After that, he stopped writing, falling into a depression. As in Love Novel (2024), Sajko writes in long, breathless sentences, and each chapter is comprised of a single one. As the train moves on, the narrator reflects on his violent, alcoholic father; his estranged older brother who drained their mother’s savings; their mother, forced to leave home for employment in Germany; and his tough, rural boyhood: “My father was cursed, just as we were cursed, simply because we were boys, and nothing good could ever come of us.” We learn about the woman he loved and failed, though she remains to the end opaque; their love story is the least compelling of Sajko’s narrative threads, and Iv. more antihero than victim of fate. He contemplates loss—of people, hopes, ideals—and displacement. “The tragedy of war,” he tells us, “is ultimately the tragedy of travel, mapping out with agonising precision the passage from human to inhuman.”

A darkly meditative work from a strong and unflinching voice.