Biljana Jovanović
Dogs and Others
Trans. John K. Cox. London. Istros Books.
- 189 pages.
A cult figure when Dogs appeared in Serbia
in 1980, dead at forty-three in 1996, Biljana
Jovanović today commands widespread
respect. Yet Dogs constitutes her first work
to be published whole in English. The dys-
functional family in this first-person faux
memoir reflects Jovanović’s Yugoslavia, a
society in existential crisis, caught between
East and West, tradition and postmodernity,
unity and ethnonationalism—an unstable,
dog-eat-dog world governed by patriarchy,
power, lust, and greed.
Dogs’ meandering plot traces the quest
of its lesbian protagonist Lidia to “discon-
nect” from the “mutual family narrative”
that paints her a selfish ingrate, her brother
Danilo a crybaby loser. Lidia lives in Zemun
(greater Belgrade) with Danilo and their
elderly grandmother, Jaglika. The siblings’
mother, Marina, has fled with a newish
husband to Milan. The plot arc includes
Jaglika’s aging and death, Danilo’s deteriora-
tion and suicide, and Marina’s increasingly
naked cruelty.
Comprising twenty-eight chapters
(some titled, some with obscure epigraphs
and arcane attributions), Lidia’s graphic
stream of consciousness intertwines past
with present through dreams, digressions,
and occasional “Pictures” or “Stories” of
“Childhood.” Realism laced with dark
humor depicts castration and decapita-
tion, emotional and physical abuse, bodily
excretions, and damaged people, evoking
a world of exploitation and deceit. Lid-
ia’s sarcasm punctures duplicity, lyricism
reserved only for her lover Milena, whose
skin “glowed in all directions... and
took my breath away.” Parenthetical phras-
es amplify, negate, challenge, and mock,
as when Lidia traces the family story:
“(Jaglika the creator—her memories go
back the furthest; Marina the great magus;
Danilo and I, the assistants.. .).”
That Lidia’s family lives on Svetosavska
(St. Sava, founder of Serbia’s Orthodox
Church) Street ironically underscores the
societal absence of authentic love. Their
apartment hosts sexual trysts, black-mar-
ket porn, and drugs. The siblings care for
one another, but when Lidia asks Jaglika,
“Do you love me?”—the one-time shop-
keeper’s answer “the exact same amount
that you love me.. .”—Lidia taunts her
grandmother for “retailing all your life.”
And rather than maternal love, Marina
sends her children, illegitimate, occasional
small monetary gifts.
Here “dogs” of various kinds (“sick,”
“vengeful,” “pathetic,” etc.) wield sex for
power. Lidia’s boss and Danilo’s doctor
rape her; she becomes Milena’s “slave.” An
anonymous letter writer mourns men’s loss
of power. Marina must have a man in her
thrall. Adored by Lidia and Danilo, raped
by her dentist, Milena seduces a mentally
challenged patient and revels in the siblings’
worship before abandoning them.
The specter of suicide haunts Lidia and
Danilo. Marina and Jaglika etched on the
young bastards’ psyches details of their
father’s gruesome self-murder, which alter-nate with images of Tsvetaeva’s final act
as Lidia has sex with Milena. Lydia urges
Danilo to love, but his “feelings of abandon-
ment” lead to suicide. In Belgrade for her
son’s funeral, having only wired money for
Jaglika’s, Marina, “all done up,” husband
in tow, blames Lidia for Danilo’s end, one
answer to a tormented existence.
Dogs withholds closure. Rejecting Mari-
na’s hate-filled words and “stupid identity
games,” Lidia may or may not transcend
her past. But she, at least, confronts hard
truths. Yugoslavia refused—and commit-
ted suicide.
Michele Levy
North Carolina A&T State UniversityMarcelo Báez Meza
Nunca más Amarilis: Biof icción
def initiva de Márgara SáenzQuito, Ecuador. Libresa. 2018. 254 pages.This roller coaster of a “biofiction” is a report
to an academy that is more Bolañesque and
an escape from institutionalized literary
constraints than a Kafkaesque performance
about human transformation. The kernel
for its careful reimagining of how to novel-
ize an un-Churchillian “riddle, wrapped in
a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps
there is a key” is a truthy story about the
apocryphal Ecuadoran poet Márgara Sáenz
and the literary mischief surrounding her
paper life. Were this work published in a
Spanish-language publishing center instead
of by a national press in a “peripheral”
country with a purportedly small or minor
literature, this award-winning novel would
attract translations and greater accolades,
considerations that Nunca más Amarilis
textualizes indirectly.
The objective is not settling scores with
a literary domain (predominantly Peruvian
and Ecuadoran) that is more and more a
parody of itself but an analysis of autho-
rial evasions. Márgara’s initial words are “Be
careful with the people you invent because
it can turn out they exist.” Many do in the
forty-three sections that make up the novel,Books in Review
98 W LT SUMMER 2019