Tag: inter-generational trauma

Review | A Country to Call Home (ed.) Lucy Popescu | Book of the Week

So refugee week is over. The fact that the UK is the only country in Europe where refugees who arrive looking for a safe haven are detained indefinitely, and are often sent back home to face persecution, torture or death, will be kicked into the long grass once again. Certain politicians continue to use the language of disaster and provoke fear by swelling numbers of arrivals, backed by box-ticking Home Office officials.

Refugees are individuals seeking asylum for humanitarian reasons and suffer trauma, broken dreams, love and loss as a consequence. They are not amorphous groups to be rendered and processed and imprisoned in detention centres like criminals. Such a hostile environment is anything but a welcoming new home, and some go crazy with grief.   Continue reading Review | A Country to Call Home (ed.) Lucy Popescu | Book of the Week

BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Thurs 27 Sept., Waterstones, Nottingham, 6.30 p.m. | Christina Pribićević-Zorić, Susan Curtis @istrosbooks @waterstonesNG

The fourth talk of the BookBlast® 10×10 tour, a nationwide celebration of independent publishing, features Istros Books, founded in 2011, to showcase the very best fiction and non-fiction from the Balkan region to a new audience of English speakers, through quality translation. Its authors include European prize winners, polemic journalists turned crime writers and social philosophers turned poets. Book Tickets

susan_curtis_kojakovic_bookblast_diary_interviewOn Thurs 27 Sept @waterstonesNG Susan Curtis, the founder of Istros Books, will lead a discussion with fellow translator, Christina Pribićević-Zorić, on The End of the World? How the Balkans writes the Holocaust. They will be joined by Georgia de Chamberet who is currently translating The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez for Verso Books (2019).

Book extract: Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić, (October, 2018) translated by Susan Curtis & Celia Hawkesworth, consists of two stories that skilfully revisit the question of “doubles”, and how an individual is perpetually caught between their own beliefs and those imposed on them by society.  Meet Susan the translator-publisher in person on Thurs 27 Sept. @istrosbooks Continue reading BookBlast® 10×10 Tour | Thurs 27 Sept., Waterstones, Nottingham, 6.30 p.m. | Christina Pribićević-Zorić, Susan Curtis @istrosbooks @waterstonesNG

Review | Seven Terrors, Selvedin Avdić | Book of the Week

 “I noticed that the pigeons have completely lost their faith in people. It is impossible to get nearer than five metres to any one of them.” [p. 38]

Because of the war in Syria, an estimated 12.5 million people are displaced, and refugees seeking asylum in Europe invariably develop depression, anxiety and PTSD. The world is facing the highest levels of displacement ever in history, with 65.3 million people forced from their homes by war, internal conflicts, drought or poor economies. The walking traumatised are becoming a major challenge of the twenty-first century, requiring a global plan.

The Bosnian war of 1992-95 resulted in some of the worst atrocities seen in Europe since the Nazi era. More than 100,000 people were killed and, according to a recent report by Al Jazeera, twenty years on many survivors suffering from trauma are not getting the help they need. 

 “I am solitary and depressed. A man with no one to look after him . . .” The narrator has spent nine months and three days in bed after his wife walked out on their five-year marriage. It is 7 March 2005, it is snowing, and he is coming back into life. He plays the Rolling Stones and watches the world outside his window.
 Continue reading Review | Seven Terrors, Selvedin Avdić | Book of the Week

Review | Travels in a Dervish Cloak, Isambard Wilkinson | Book of the Week

“The next morning, standing in the doorway to see me off on my way to the north of Punjab, to the capital, Islamabad, the Begum strained with both hands to raise a heavy old leather-bound Koran under which I ducked to receive divine protection. She resembled a classical figure holding up a torch so that I might see the good in her country.”

Two great matriarchs loom over this memoir which flies over Pakistan like a magical flying carpet: Isambard Wilkinson’s grandmother, and her friend, Sajida Ali Khan a.k.a. the Begum, from Lahore in the Punjab. As a small boy visiting the Irish family home that is suffused with a “heady, dusty fragrance” and chock-full of Anglo-Indian mementoes dating back to the 19th century, a warm and intoxicating vision of another world offered an antidote to the cold austerity of boarding school. His first actual visit to Pakistan was with his grandmother in 1990, to attend a wedding of one of the Begum’s children; and then in 2006 as foreign correspondent. His desire to explore the country and live there eventually was cut short by kidney failure, dialysis and successful surgery when his brother gave him a kidney. Travels in a Dervish Cloak has been seven years in the making. Continue reading Review | Travels in a Dervish Cloak, Isambard Wilkinson | Book of the Week

Review | The Photographer, Meike Ziervogel | Book of the Week

Meike Ziervogel: “As long as you can keep disorder at bay you have control. You can see clearly, you know what step to take next. Albert can’t stand chaos. He used to be able to tolerate it. In fact, when he was young he never made a distinction between order and disorder. Never thought about it. That wasn’t how he perceived the world, neatly divided into two camps, with judgements attached: good or bad. But now he’s convinced, has become convinced over the last years, that chaos is the enemy of the people. Every now and again, for a brief moment, he looks longingly back to a time when he wasn’t so clear-sighted. He knows that this lack of a clear view helped him to take good photographs. He was open to surprise, to being surprised.”

Being in a war changes a person for ever. The Photographer is a tale of betrayal, loyalty, sacrifice and survival. The evacuation of East Prussia is pivotal for the family at the centre of the story. By winter 1945, nearly 11 million Germans — mostly women and children — had fled the Eastern provinces of the Reich, heading west. Killings and rapes committed by the Red Army triggered fear and panic amongst the population.

Continue reading Review | The Photographer, Meike Ziervogel | Book of the Week

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