Sons, Daughters

"At heart, it’s a very tender love story, but a love story with a difference. The woman who is the narrator and the protagonist, Lucija, has locked-in syndrome after a car accident. She is in a hospital, immobile, but for her eyes which she can only move vertically and which she uses to communicate by blinking. The novel meanders through other people’s perspectives. The second part is told by her lover, who is also trapped in a body that he can’t recognize as his own. He was designated female at birth and he finds that his body betrays his own feeling of himself as a man by growing breasts, menstruating and so on. So he is another character who’s contending with what is described in the novel as “our body, our worst hell.” Then there’s a third part, about Lucija’s mother, who, in a way, is also entombed and restrained by her own upbringing in a male-dominated society. So the author’s contention is that there is a parallel between these three lives, with this metaphor of the body as a prison. We can be complicit in our own restriction by it. In a wider sense, it’s a book about conformity and the price of freedom, in an atmosphere of violence where the pressure to conform is intense and malign. Somewhere in the novel, the author writes that “censure and mockery are the strongest glue in all human communities.” It’s about the way people are forced to suppress and censor their own sense of themselves in whatever way, in order to fit in. It’s about the tyranny of normality. To give some background to this novel, it’s set in Croatia after the War of Independence in the 1990s. Lucija’s family has suffered a breakup as a result of the war. Everyone is affected by this: her mother, her brother who is a bully, partly as a result of this history. The author herself grew up in a refugee camp—she’s written about that elsewhere—and that’s very much part of this novel, the backstory as to how we get to this society. A more specific context is that this novel was published in 2020 in Croatian. It’s made explicit in an afterword by the author that it was written after Croatia ratified the Istanbul Convention in 2018. The Istanbul Convention (2011) is about violence against women and it was one of the EU laws that Croatia, when joining the EU, had to agree to. But, as the author tells it, it became an excuse for far-right forces in Croatia to object to trans people. There was a welling up of a lot of hatred and physical violence. There were right-wing elements scaremongering, saying, ‘If you join the EU, your children will have to be trans.’ So that’s one of the author’s motivations for imagining herself into these different characters and this love affair. The translation was published by Seven Stories Press in the UK. I felt the book was a cross between Jean-Dominique Bauby’s classic stroke memoir, The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly , which came out in 1997, and Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit . It’s a combination of circumstances that creates something transformative. As judges—this time, my fellow judges were the translator and Associate Professor in Ukrainian and East European Culture at University College London, Uilleam Blacker, the writer and editor, Selma Dabbagh and the writer and BBC foreign correspondent, Fergal Keane—we found it a very powerful novel that can transform the way the reader thinks about things, about people. It’s a profound act of understanding, of other people’s lives. That was one of the reasons why we chose it. The language is also very fresh and invigorating. The candour of it, Lucija’s voice. She’s paralyzed in hospital but is fully conscious. She’s mordant. She’s spiky and truculent. It’s a very exciting piece of writing."