Belladonna

Andreas Ban, a
psychologist who no longer psychologizes, a writer who no longer writes,
lives alone in a coastal town in
Croatia. His body is failing him. He sifts through the remnants of his
life-his research,
books, medical records, photographs-remembering old lovers and friends,
the
tragedies of WWII, the breakup of Yugoslavia. Ban's memories
of Belgrade (which he thought he had left behind) and of Amsterdam (a
different world and life) alternate with meditations
on hole-ridden time (ebbing away through its perforations), on his
measly pension, on growing old and fragile, on the intelligence of rats
and the
agelessness of lobsters, on deadly nightshade. He tries to push the past
away, "to land on
a little island of time in which tomorrow does not exist, in which
yesterday is buried."

Drndic leafs through the horrors of history with a cold unflinching
wit. "The past is riddled with holes," she writes. "Souvenirs can't
help here." And they don't.