Her latest book, “April in Berlin” (Fraktura, Zagreb 2009) is according to the author “neither a diary, nor a novel, nor a travelogue, nor a series of essays, yet it is all of those”. Daša Drndić has been active in many literary genres over the years, she has worked as an editor, wrote literary criticism, radio-plays, essays, short stories, and taught literature, but, in her words, she has dreamt “of writing only”.
Daša Drndić was born in Zagreb, Croatia in 1946. From 1953 to 1992 she lived and worked in Belgrade. She returned to Croatia in 1992. In 1995–1997 she lived in Canada. She has a master's degree on theatre and communications in the US, as a Fulbright Fellow, and a doctorate on protofeminism and the Left at the University of Rijeka in Croatia.
Daša Drndić is author of numerous novels and short stories. Her prose has been translated into Slovenian, Polish, Hungarian, Italian, English, French, Dutch and Finnish. She has also written some thirty radio-plays and done a number of radio features that have been broadcast at home and abroad.
Ms. Drndić talked to Southeast Europe: People and Culture about her latest book and the profession of a writer.
What are you working on now?
At the present I’m in a reading phase, after having worked on some kind of a diary-travelogue due to a month’s writer-in-residence stay in Amsterdam. I’m planning on starting a new text this summer, one dealing with illness, with various kinds of illnesses.
You are a novelist, a poet, you do radio plays and documentaries, write literary and theatre reviews, you teach literature, translate literature, have worked as an editor in publishing....Which of all these forms of literary engagement gives you most pleasure?
Too many questions in a breath! I’m not a poet. I might become one, old age approaching, since quite a few prose writers do turn to poetry when time becomes short and their vertebrae stiff and painful. I used to write radio-plays and produce radio features (documentaries) in my previous life, which is behind me but not forgotten. I stopped writing literary and theatre reviews (critiques) because that stage (among other cultural platforms) in Croatia has, in my opinion, become too constricted, commercialised, and above all, writing literary criticism is a time-consuming job, mentally exhausting travail that doesn’t pay at all. I teach literature because I have to live off some work. I dream of writing only, though for me writing is not a pleasure-giving process, more of a sadomasochistic one. Writing requires a lot of patience, some knowledge, some experience, empathy, a social and political stance, silence and time. Time and I are in permanent conflict, chasing each other in endless disputes.
What are your great themes in writing?
Most of what I write has to do with memory, collective and individual responsibility and guilt in turbulent historic and present times. By doing so, I concentrate on personal stories which at times denounce official history.
Your latest book, released last year, is titled "April in Berlin". Please tell me more about it.
“April in Berlin” is a literary mélange, which has been giving superficial and lobotomised critics some headaches. It is neither a diary, nor a novel, nor a travelogue, nor a series of essays, yet it is all of those. It is some kind of a settling of accounts with ossified concepts of form and substance, it has to do with the freedom of language related to one’s personal freedom, with, to be faintly poetical, the River Lethe flooding our present, it has to do with elements of fascism nestling around us and our unwillingness to see them, our blindness and devastating silences.
Tell me about your writing process? Is it pleasurable, painful...?
For me writing is a slow and tedious, time-consuming and exhausting process. It requires both physical and mental energy and relative physical and mental health, a sharp critical stand, some controlled anger, an eye for detail, empathy for human suffering.
What are in your view the challenges for modern Croatian literature?
There are good writers in Croatia, they don’t need challenges “for belonging, for being incorporated into anything”, they are writers on their own. They need not “belong” to any specific culture, because to belong often means to be “the property of”. Those are not the writers on the top-lists. Those are not the ones whose books sell well. Those are not popular writers. Those are educated, well read writers, refined in taste and style, but they are more or less invisible to a broad reading audience. In this aspect Croatia is no exception. Look at the best-sellers worldwide. In most cases they are mediocre, easily digested books. We are living fast lives: fast-food, fast-sex, fast-emotions - we are not living at all, we are surfing through life. Most of literature follows this shallow fancy touch-and-go trend.
Also, what do “challenges for modern Croatian literature” mean? Here again appears the question of neatly placing ideas, art, and creativity into drawers or files, with clearly inscribed labels on them. This could bring us to the topics of national identity and national art, which ultimately lead to discussions on population and demography politics, then to gender roles, then to the role of the Church, and soon we’re back in 1933... So, I would rather talk about the literature written in Croatia, in the Croatian (or whichever) language, than about Croatian literature.
