Love Novel

Description

Winner of the HKW Internationaler Literaturpreis Shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award One ofThe MillionsMost Anticipated Titles of 2024 One ofKirkus Reviews Twenty Books You Can Read in a Weekend One of theBoston Globes Anticipated Forthcoming Titles An American Booksellers Association Indie Next PickLove in late capitalism: in an unnamed city, a husband and wife wage a silent war of rage and resentment. He, an out-of-work Dante scholar, is trying to change the worldand write a novel. She was once a passable actress, but now shes failing at breastfeeding. They take on gigs and debts. He drinks cheap wine; she cleans obsessively. In their two-room at the tension rises and turns exquisite: the rent is past due, their careers have stalled, the regime is crumbling, and theres always the baby, the baby who wont stop crying.Intense and astutely ironic, devastating and darkly comic, Ivana SajkosLove Noveltakes a scalpel to the heart of modern married life.Praise forLove NovelSajko takes no prisoners . . . [Love Novel] gloriously marries sociopolitical commentary on failed capitalism in a failed state to the inevitability of failed marriage, locating the narrative in an extraordinary violence of mind and body . . . Matching form with content, it depicts lives that involve walking constantly on tightropes with a ferocity of prose that allows no breathing space, consummately conveying the claustrophobic existence of the characters as external as well as personal circumstances close in on them.Dublin Literary Award Judges CitationA devastating book, humane, original, and deeply relevant.Kirkus Reviews(starred review)A work of startling and brass originality. Sajko never shies away from the broken and crass aspects of being in love. But within this writing, moments of grace and absolute beauty shine through. Moments as exquisite as the rst falling snowakes that stop you in your tracks.Heather ONeill, author ofWhen We Lost Our Heads[Sajkos] sentences mimic how, in the heat of argument, thoughts converge, events conflate, and emotions surge until one forgets where it all began . . .Literary Review of CanadaLove Novelis not a comfortable read, but it is a timely exploration of socio-economic inequality, a raw confrontation of the pain humans are capable of inflicting on one another, and a fearless engagement with the challenges of poverty and parenthood.Helen Vassallo,Reading in TranslationSajkos taut, innovative writing has a pounding tempo; she unleashes a stream of consciousness that combines all the hopes, regrets and resentments competing in the minds of her characters . . . Every word has been chosen carefully.Harriet Zaidman,Winnipeg Free PressA necessary read . . . brief yet intricate, raw but profoundly touching.Anne Smith-Nochasak,The Miramichi ReaderThe true love story in this novel is the love between the reader and the characters, asking the reader to sympathize with the flawed, struggling characters . . . reminding them that some relationships are too interwoven to be truly cut apart.Alex Carrigan,The /temz/ ReviewIn its depiction of a contemporary relationship submitted to the meatgrinder of contemporary demands and expectations,Love Novelis unafraid and unsparing in its honesty.Andrew Hood, Bookshelf.caA sharp and claustrophobic portrait of a fraying marriage . . . Sajko never takes her foot off the gas in this potent and incendiary outing.Publishers WeeklyLove Novelis a universal story about passion and poverty thats told in rich language.Suzanne Kamata,Foreword ReviewsThe interpersonal magic now lost, or at least forgotten, but above all: poisoned by the big bad world out there. Ivana Sajko celebrates this sad state of affairs with power and intensity.NDR KulturBreathless, barely punctuated. Her heroes: a nameless couple in a Mediterranean nowhere, devoted to each other in hate. A tough, great novel.Neue PresseA brilliant novel: intense and poetic, exhilarating and devastating.Priya Basil, author ofIshq and Mushq