Sons, Daughters

Description

Ivana Bodrožić’s latest award-winning novel tells a story of being locked in: socially, domestically and intimately, told through three different perspectives, all deeply marked and wounded by the patriarchy in their own way.

Here the Croatian poet and writer depicts a wrenching love between a transgender man and a woman as well as a demanding love between a mother and a daughter in a narrative about breaking through and liberation of the mind, family, and society.

This is a story of hidden gay and trans relationships, the effects of a near-fatal accident, and an oppressed childhood, where Ivana Bodrožić tackles the issues addressed in her previous works—issues of otherness, identity and gender, pain and guilt, injustice and violence.

A daughter is paralyzed after a car crash, left without the ability to speak, trapped in a hospital bed, unable to move anything but her eyes. Although she is immobilized, her mind reels, moving through time, her memories a salve and a burden. A son is stuck in a body that he doesn’t feel is his own. He endures misperceptions and abuse on the way to becoming who he truly is. A mother who grew up being told she was never good enough, in a world with no place for the desires and choices of women. She carries with her the burden of generations.

These three stories run parallel and intertwine. Three voices deepen and give perspective to one another’s truth, pain, and struggle to survive.”In Ivana Bodrožić’s third novel, freedom often comes at the cost of forgetting—forgetting war and those lost to it, forgetting a life before transition, forgetting life itself for the simulacrum of it. Each character is locked into a body, to history, to a manner of living they would never choose, loosened only occasionally by their desperate attempts to escape these bonds. These characters twine together, giving us a fractured view of lives broken by violence and isolation, while reminding us of the cacophony of love, imperfect and brittle as it may be, that we leave in our wakes.” — Alex DiFrancesco, author of Transmutation

“Each book by Ivana Bodrožić is a literary event here in Croatia. Her new novel, Sons, Daughters, is news the world over; wherever the word ‘banned’ is used, the places others evade, these are the places where Ivana begins her writing and pushes it to the limit, to the most intimate nooks and crannies, to the locked heart of all things and she does this with remarkable ease and gravity. Epic in scope, lyrical, poetic and polemic in style, Sons, Daughters is a novel about us; about daughters and sons, a novel that will be read, people will write and talk about it—for a very long time to come.”
—Olja Savičević Ivančević, author of Farewell Cowboy

“The theme of this complex novel is what our body, our gender at birth, foists on us, our body that can become a cage built by society around a person’s identity. The novel is dedicated to unfreedom and the price a person pays when choosing freedom—about the high price of otherness—the author has written with nuanced psychological insight and the sensibility of a serious writer.”
—Slavenka Drakulić, author of They Would Never Hurt a Fly

“In this new novel, combining the familiar narrative procedure with a new, more intricate set of motives, Ivana Bodrožić tackles the issues addressed in her previous works, issues of the Other and otherness, identity and gender, pain and guilt, injustice and violence. We have gained so much with her new novel: it is great literature enforced by the justified social engagement, far from the fashionable activism devoid of substance. We have also gained one of the most tender and wrenching love stories in the contemporary Croatian Literature.” —Vanja Kulaš, Moderna vremena

“However, this novel does not speak solely of the transgenerational trauma and transgender issues; Ivana Bodrožić unlocks a subject which is yet to be raised in the Croatian literature, which is now overcast with taboo or stigma to say the least; we have yet to write courageously and openly of female violence, of the violence of the mothers towards their children, one that exists along with male violence, of how women perpetuate the force of malice and pain, behind which stand their own traumas and struggles. This novel speaks up about what it means to be a woman in a man’s world, a thing that is created, in equal measures, by both genders.” —Tanja Tolić, Najbolje knjige

IVANA BODROŽIĆ was born in Vukovar, Croatia, in 1982, where she lived until the Yugoslav Wars started in 1991. That year her father disappeared while fighting for Croatian independence and she and the rest of her family moved to a refugee hotel in Kumrovec. In 2005, she published her first poetry collection, The First Step into Darkness, and in 2010 her acclaimed and bestselling first novel The Hotel Tito, which won three major awards in Croatia and the Prix Ulysse for Best Debut Novel in France. It was published by Seven Stories in 2017. Since then Bodrozic released her second poetry collection, A Crossing for Wild Animals, and a short story collection, 100% Cotton. We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day, published by Seven Stories in 2021, is her second novel and her first political thriller. Sons, Daughters, Bodrožić’s third novel, marks another step in a new direction.

ELLEN ELIAS-BURSAC translates fiction and nonfiction from Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. She has taught in the Harvard University Slavic Department and is a contributing editor to Asymptote. She has translated both of Ivana Bodrožić’s previous books for Seven Stories along with Robert Perisic’s novel No-Signal Area. She lives in Boston.US

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