#RivetingReviews: Petar Penda reviews GRANDMA NON-OUI by Lidija Dimkovska

In his recent book on the novel, one of the most famous literary critics and theoreticians, Fredric Jameson, states that a novel is an intervention, which a naïve reader mostly takes as a representation of reality. He adds that the novel intervenes to alter or correct our common opinions of a situation and, in the best cases, suggests a wholly new idea of what makes the experience of life. Jameson further explicates that the most interesting contemporary novels are those which try to awaken a sense of a collectivity behind individual experience, unveiling a relationship between isolated subjective views and community. According to these plausible criteria, Lidija Dimkovska’s Grandma Non-Oui is a remarkable contemporary novel. Not only does it intervene and give the reader a different perspective on the rise of fascism in the late 1930s and 1940s, and today, through the eyes of the fascists and their victims, but it also transforms an individual viewpoint on life into a collective one. 

Lidija Dimkovska is an acclaimed poet, novelist and translator, born in Skopje, North Macedonia, and currently living in Slovenia. Her oeuvre make six books of poetry, four novels, an ‘American Diary’, a collection of short stories and, as editor, four anthologies. She has received a number of prestigious regional and international awards, which led to her books being translated into fifteen languages. The excerpts from her novels, poems, essays, interviews and reviews about her books have been published in the Times Literary Supplement, Paris Review, Words Without Borders and in a number of other renowned journals.

Grandma Non-Oui is a sweeping novel whose plot covers the period from 1939 to 2016 and is divided between a small town in Sicily and Split in Croatia. In the form of (sometimes imagined) conversations exchanged between a grandmother and her granddaughter, both with the same name, Nedjeljka, with the nickname Neda (which grandmother’s professor translated into the French ‘Non-Oui’ meaning ‘no-yes’ when divided into syllables), we learn about their lives during the Second World War, through the civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and in the post-war era. The two characters face the alienated world and tell a story of immigration, loneliness, craving for belonging, nostalgia for their hometown and the sense of loss for both their old and newly attained homes. 

The women share a strong bond and are the most attached to one another in their extended family. Although the generation gap is rather large, they are one another’s confidants. They witness the rise of fascism, including within their own family, which is particularly hurtful for them. The sense of not belonging to their families, or to either Italy or Croatia, makes their mutual attachment even more powerful. Placed in the historical context of post-war and inter-war migrations, their feelings represent the more general emotions experienced by people both back then, and in the present day, forced to leave their homes in search of a better life or due to war.

We learn that state propaganda is to be blamed for the spread of fascist ideas, both in the past and now, although this is not peculiar to Italy and Croatia, but has a global character and a worldwide presence. Dimkovska suggests that often people get carried away by the imposed idea of fascism, as in the character Carlo’s case, and only later realise how wrong they were. This was the case with numerous Italian soldiers who stayed to fight with partisan units against the German forces after the capitulation of Italy in 1943. It is implied here that the minority in power easily influence the collective consciousness and model it for their own political needs, while individual consciousness becomes drowned in the frenzy of common madness. 

Grandmother Non-Oui’s distance and absence from Split slowly eradicates her presence in her beloved and much-missed hometown. When she visits her family and friends she doesn’t know what to talk about with them. Later, when her granddaughter visits Split, she doesn’t find any traces of her grandmother’s life there – only a few possessions she left behind. In addressing her late grandmother, she states: 

‘Nonna, you were no longer even a ghost or someone who had once lived there. I’m sorry I have to tell you this, but I felt you had died twice: first, the true physical death in Castellammare del Golfo, and then as a person, a spirit, in Split.’ 

However, the late Neda lives in the mind and heart of the young Neda and the vivid memory of her is passed on. 

There’s a strong symbolism in the very name of Neda (Non-Oui, Yes-No). The first part of her name Ne (No) stands for the ‘no’ to fascism, while the second part stands for the ‘Yes’ to the prosperous future, and freedom and life in general. 

‘But life is always Yes. Death is always No. It was just the other way around, Nonna, in your name, Grandmother Non-Oui. First you were no, then you were yes.’

This passage from the novel sums up the grandmother’s and granddaughter’s lives, and their striving for personal and collective happiness. Feeling that an individual resistance to fascism is almost futile, the granddaughter still decides to do something against the upcoming and conquering fascism. That is why Neda decides, in the bookstore where she works in Palermo, to represent Croatian writers banned from Croatian bookstores.

The nostalgic and emotional language of Grandma Non-Oui, elegantly rendered in the English translation by Christina E. Kramer, resonates deeply with the reader. Grandma Non-Oui is a beautifully written, deep and emotional novel; a must-read for picky readers who want to enjoy both an excellent plot and its artistic presentation.

Reviewed by Petar Penda

GRANDMA NON-OUI

Written by Lidija Dimkovska

Translated from the Macedonian by Christina Kramer

Published by Istros Books (2024)

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Professor Petar Penda is a translator, critic and poet who teaches at the University of Banja Luka in Bosnia and Herzegovina. His major monographs include T. S. Eliot: Poetical and Theoretical Contextualization (University of Banja Luka, 2012), Contemporary Anglo-American Poetry (co-authored with T. Bijelić and A. Nikčević Batrićević, 2021), Aesthetics and Ideology of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). He has edited a dozen books, one of the most notable being The Whirlwind of Passion: New Critical Perspectives on William Shakespeare (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). His translations into Serbian of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet are due to be published in 2024. His poetry and translations of contemporary poets from Serbia, Montenegro, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as various contemporary British and American poets, have been published in a number of high-profile regional journals, as well as in the US and UK.

Read Petar Penda’s #‎RivetingReview of ENGAGEMENT by Çiler İlhan