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An unresolved trauma hangs heavy over the childhood household: Tamara\u2019s father has fled his Balkan homeland, and is obsessed both with the memories of his losses there and with the news that tells him how his homeland continues to tear itself apart. \u201cDad is stuck in time, remembering the war\u201d says Tamara\u2019s child voice, observing how the present is not enough to pull her father out of the emotional stasis in which the war has left him. The legacy of the war is passed down to a generation who had no direct experience of it, transmitted through the father\u2019s silences and obsessions: \u201cI inhabit places I\u2019ve never been. Dad, on the other hand, has never left that distant time.\u201d Dragged into a past that her father can neither leave nor fully share, Tamara is left adrift, and turns to writing to find her own territory (\u201cI founded my own country in a blue notebook where I\u2019m not a minority\u201d), and this gives her a place to call home (\u201cMy blue journal, the site where I\u2019d founded my homeland, now pushes me into new territories\u201d). As for Tamara\u2019s mother, she is struggling with ghosts of her own, as it transpires that her other two children are from a different relationship (which will be the only one she remembers when a sudden collapse leads her to lose a big swathe of her memory). She papers over the cracks in her marriage, finding solace in the arms of a decorator, and ultimately leaves Tamara\u2019s father one night that represents \u201canother warped date that will alter the rest of the calendar.\u201d<\/p>\n
All of this brokenness is recounted in the present tense, lending an immediacy to the narration that works very well with the theatrical setting. Though Tamara as a character can only follow where her role takes her, Jeftanovic as author deftly directs her narrator via a detached yet expressive prose that recounts personal and historical tragedy without melodrama or sensationalism. Frances Riddle\u2019s translation is, as always, impeccable: perfectly pitched and with an admirable knack for finding unexpected words and collocations that, once you\u2019ve read them, seem like the only possible option: a \u201cgnash<\/em> of fire on the horizon\u201d, \u201cdented<\/em> voices shuddering the walls\u201d, \u201cthere are lagoons <\/em>of silence\u201d, \u201cDad cloaked <\/em>by the newspaper, hiding his fist of a heart <\/em>behind it\u201d, \u201cthey strafe <\/em>the centre of my heart\u201d).<\/p>\n