Every Time We Say Goodbye

The unnamed narrator of this intense and recursive work from Sajko unfurls an angst-fueled account of his train trip from Croatia to Berlin. He has left in a rush, driven by emotional turmoil over the deaths of his violent father and self-involved mother, as well as a recent breakup with his girlfriend. His memories are vivid, and as the train makes its way up the coast, he circles through fond recollections of his grandmother, who lived in a rustic village and doted on him, and memories of his confusion as a teen during the Balkan Wars. A journalist by trade, he’s chronically afflicted with writer’s block, and fancies himself a modern-day Baudelaire. He peppers the narrative with cultural references, from Jean Genet’s theories about war photography (the narrator agrees with Genet that “a photograph’s precision doesn’t make you a witness”) to Pearl Jam, remembering how their song about a classroom suicide played years earlier during a nightclub shooting. The sluggish train suffers multiple delays and route changes, a perfect metaphor for the narrator’s aimlessness and anxiety, “meandering and circling around what hurts the most and yet cannot be changed as it shrinks into nothingness behind me.” Sajko’s blackhearted modernist novel is worth a look. (Mar.)