Diary of Interrupted Daysby Dragan Todorovic
Random House Canada (2009), 252 pp.
Dragan Todorovic’s debut novel is a compelling chronicle of rebellion, wreckage, and refuge, set amid the disintegration of Yugoslavia during the 1990s. The book centres on three Serbs, Boris, Johnny, and Sara, who long to escape the destructive politics and warfare threatening to engulf their youth. Todorovic introduces us to Boris in 1999, on his return to Europe from Canada, where he has fled as a refugee. As he makes his way toward Belgrade, he flashes back to his coming of age as an iconoclastic artist in constant conflict with his father, the General, a global symbol of Serbian aggression. His partner in rebellion is his best friend, Johnny, first shown performing a Hendrix-at-Woodstock-style guitar solo at a protest concert. As the face of youthful resistance to the war, Johnny becomes a target for the authorities, who draft him and force him to serve in a secret military action. After intervening in the gang rape of a young Croatian girl by Serbian mercenaries, he flees to Amsterdam, abandoning his hope for a life with his girlfriend, Sara, a journalist, who instead marries Boris and escapes to Toronto. The lives of the three intersect again only years later, when a personal tragedy leads them to confront the choices thrust upon them by chaos.
Drawing on his own experiences as a refugee, Todorovic peppers this material with occasionally melodramatic, but often trenchant and always sincere insight into war and immigrant life. “There is no narrative of exile,” Boris reflects at one point. “It is a chopped-up existence.” The great success of Diary of Interrupted Days is to prove otherwise, rendering fragmented lives and complex conflict into an absorbing tale.
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