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Magdalena Blažević: U kasno ljeto (In Late Summer)

We first meet Ivana when she is seven. She will be going to school in the autumn. But death is not far away. Death has a gentle face, his eyes not visible beneath the cocked cap. It’s soft and dark green like forest moss. We follow Ivana’s generally happy childhood but we know this happiness is not going to last.

The novel is set in Bosnia in the early 1990s and we know that things are going to get nasty. Blažević jumps around in the chronology. We are meeting her here when she is seven but, soon after her mother arrives, wounded in the leg and it is clear that by this time Ivana has already gone. Soon after she introduces herself: My name is Ivana. I lived for fourteen summers, and this is the story of my last.

Her family live in a village in Bosnia near the Bosna river. This is the only place name we get and the only way we know the action takes place in Bosnia though two towns called only B- and Z- are mentioned. It is an agricultural village. Ivana lives with her parents, older brother and grandparents. Her best friend is her cousin Dunja, who lives nearby. The family is close knit and the people in the village seem to get on with one another. While Ivana’s childhood, before the Bosnian war, is not idyllic, it is clear that everyone gets by and everyone gets on with one another. Yes, the grandmother is bald and the grandfather drinks too much. Ivana has an old bike she inherits from her brother. She falls off one day and hurts her knee but, overall, the life may not be luxurious but her childhood is generally happy.

Death is present as we see the death of numerous animals from squirrels falling from the nest to their cow giving birth to a still-born calf and then herself dying to grandfather’s dogs being poisoned. The cat kills rodents, a soldier kills chicks. I can’t hide from Death Ivana comments and, as mentioned above, death is personified, popping up in person now and again.
Soldiers had come to the village earlier, when she was four. She and her brother hid. There is an omnipresent fear that they will return. To be safe, they and most (though not all) the villagers move out. They all pack up and take what they can, including the horse and the cat and a miniature Christmas tree. Not everyone leaves . One old man has lived there all his life on his own – never married – and he plans to stay’. They move to an abandoned village. Initially the two families stay together but then a rather decrepit abandoned house is found for Ivana’s family.

When the soldiers do come we get a grim picture of what happens:
Blown-out lungs.
Bits of brain in hot puddles.

Holes in breasts.
Broken bones.

Her brother is covered in blood but soon realises it is not his own though his mother’s leg is riddled with bullet holes. Ivana is killed in an attack but she continues to narrate for the rest of the book. This is by no means the first novel with a dead narrator. She tells us about her funeral – rhe body It was dug by the soldiers with pickaxes. There is no difference between digging trenches and digging graves – , how her body is later moved and a brief indication of what happens to her family and her village.

There are lots of novels about war – civil wars, revolutions, world wars, invasions. While some certainly tell us about the victims, many tell us about the politics – who is fighting whom – and give us the soldiers’ perspective . We know that this is the Bosnian war but nowhere in the book is this mentioned. Just by reading the book you would have no idea who is fighting whom nor why they are doing so. If it was not for the mention of the Bosna river, we would not know where the war was being fought . Though we hear and hear soldiers and see them attacking, they are faceless brutes. Unlike other war book we never get their perspective on either side. Indeed there seems to be no other side. Brutal soldiers appear in an ordinary village and attack the inhabitants. Apart from one brave act by Ivana’s grandfather, they are seemingly unopposed.

This is a victims’ book. The whole focus is on ordinary rural people making an ordinary living, getting by and living as most ordinary people do, with ups and downs but nothing out of the ordinary. Death – animal deaths and the normal deaths of ordinary take place but, till the soldiers came, violent human death was seemingly unknown or, at least very rare
Blažević tells her story very well as we see the normal life of normal people suddenly brutally disrupted for no apparent reason. At the end life goes on, life and death as her brother stands at her grave.

Publishing history

First published in 2022 byFraktura
First English translation i 2025 by Linden Editions
Translated by Andelka Raguz