We Trade Our Night for Someone Else's Day by Ivana Bodrožić (review)

Abstract

BOOKS IN REVIEW a photo album, with each chapter providing a picture of V.’s life with G. at certain moments, all moving toward the abyss. The structure provides the reader with a greater sense of how V. recalls her life in a way that supports, but also makes as accessible as possible, the trauma of her experience . Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that nearly everyone in V.’s life is complicit in the affair. Her relationship with G. was an open secret, and most chose to look the other way or put G.’s behavior down to his “genius” as an author. Perhaps most damning is V.’s mother and her refusal to protect her daughter. The title of the memoir, Consent (Le Consentement in French), is also an indictment of the circumstances and the world in which V. found herself. V. never gave her consent to be used by G. in the way that he did, to become someone’s fantasy, or be sacrificed by her mother and the social circle surrounding them. What is most devastating is the inability to fully recover one’s life, one’s childhood, after a traumatic experience such as this, and V. writes with brutal honesty and precision, further exposing herself to the world. In one of the most horrifically honest statements , V. writes: “When you’re fourteen, it’s not normal for a fifty-year-old man to wait for you outside your school. It’s not normal to live with him in a hotel, to find yourself in his bed at teatime with his penis in your mouth.” It’s not normal to sacrifice our children to monsters. V. is not writing this memoir solely for herself; she’s writing it as a plea to stop normalizing the type of toxic masculinity that is often excused because the male is a “great artist.” Great art does not excuse this type of behavior, and until we acknowledge this and stop accepting it, more childhoods will be stolen and destroyed. Consent is powerful and tragic, and one of the most important testimonies on this subject ever written. Andrew Martino Salisbury University Ivana Bodrožić We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day Trans. Ellen Elias-Bursać. New York. Seven Stories Press. 2021. 240 pages. IN HER NATIVE Croatia, Ivana Bodrožić is controversial. While internally displaced as a nine-year-old at the beginning of the civil war, whose father disappeared fighting for Croatian independence from Yugoslavia, she is cynical about the political and cultural legacy of the 1990s conflict . We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day caused an uproar when it was published in 2016; in the novel, Bodrožić questions every foundational element of the Croatian postwar rhetoric, politics, and institutions that are rooted in war heroism but are actually driven by corruption, bribery , and self-interest. Even more daringly, she suggests that contemporary Croatian issues are self-generated. Her criticism is sweeping, touching religion, nationalism, education, and gender politics, written in a fast-paced, narration-dominant journalistic style: “The war was actually a shiny, radiant point people kept returning to; they hadn’t moved on from what they still saw as a time of pride and glory. The aggression, the destruction, and devastation continued, only now it was not about defending the country. Two decades after the war, damaging behavior was still being honored, exacted, treated as if it were holy.” Many of Bodrožić’s negative characters are almost exact replicas of public figures engaged in political scandals whose careers benefited from the war, easily identifiable to the Croatian reader, and consequently blurring the line between the fictional and factional. The main character’s background is reminiscent of the author’s, and although the location is not specified in the novel, it is easily recognizable as Vukovar, Bodrožić’s hometown. Vukovar is one of the most eastern Croatian cities, located on the Danube and the border with Serbia, and as such was a site of horrendous battles and violence during the ethnic war. Even nowadays, the school system is segregated into Croatian and Serbian, and schoolyards are literally separated by fences. In...