Belladonna - Daša Drndic

We all could use a good wake-up jolt now and then, and Belladonna has at least one on every page. It’s got some of the most pressing subject matter you can think of — Europe cozying back up to a fascism it never wholly forsook (and how coziness itself  is crucial to fascism) — and like Andreas Ban, the mournful lead character, it never refrains from tackling the issue head-on. But you never know quite how it’s going to launch its attack: through grainy photo documentation here, through journalistic accounts of Nazis’ remorseful progeny  there, and a few pages later through music notes scrawled on the page or studies of animal psychology. Belladonna is unique and urgent and, once all the pieces have been added together, impossible to shake.