Early Sorrows

Finished in under a day! A much easier read than I was expecting (at least reading the English translation). Although, I have been told the trilogy gets more and more complex and experimental as it goes on...

I am reading this trilogy as suggested by my dissertation supervisor as a possible example for my topic (representations of illness and stigmatisation). Despite having loads of ideas for the Russian side, I need some examples from South Slavonic writers! I'm just not as well versed yet in the literature of this part of the world, compared with Russian literature, despite studying the language and culture since 2013...

I am shelving the English translations for this trilogy, despite also having a copy of the original Serbian (my dissertation supervisor kindly sent me his personal copy, as I had no idea how I was going to get hold of a copy myself!), because I knew I would need to rely heavily on the translations. My Serbian is just not strong enough yet! Having said that, I think I could have managed at least some of the first part of this trilogy? But then I would have been slower, and I need to read the whole trilogy quickly, so I can decide if I am going to use it for my dissertation. I can go back and try extracts in the original Serbian afterwards.

Anyway, this first part of the trilogy follows the childhood of Andreas Sam, a Hungarian/Montenegrian Jew born in Yugoslavia, through short, inter-connected short stories, glimpses into his life.

No, my life is no novel; it's more like a book of short stories, many short adventures, happy and sad...(p.104)

From my mother I inherited a propensity for telling tales with a mixture of fact and legend; from my father—pathos and irony. My relationship to literature has also been affected by the fact that my father was the author of an international timetable, an entire cosmopolitan and literary legacy in itself.My mother was a reader of novels until the age twenty, when she realized, not without regret, that they were “fabrications,” and rejected them for good. Her aversion to “pure fabrication” is latent in me as well. (p.116)