The unnamed narrator of this slim, stark novel is travelling by train from a small coastal town in southeastern Europe to Berlin. He is fleeing the past and its pitilessness, ruminating on his last wasted years, a first-person recollection of whole days spent in bed, hungover, “my hangovers caused by depression; my depression caused by failure, boredom, provincial life and a lack of talent to turn my misery into a masterpiece.” It’s the portrait of an artist wrecked by his art, not exactly original yet entirely fresh and new when fleshed out by Ivana Sajko, the Croatian-born author now living in Berlin whose own confession might be seen to appear a few lines earlier when her narrator laments that he can only write the way he knows, “meandering and circling around what hurts the most.”
This is, after all, Sajko’s specialty. She is a writer and performance artist whose work is highly political and whose first translated novel, Love Novel, shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award, told the story of two impoverished artists trapped in the realities of late capitalism. Every Time We Say Goodbye, her second translated novel, echoes many of the same themes — the suffering of artists, the death of love, disillusion, depravation, our failed economic system — and it is told in that same propulsive way, the words gushing out with an urgency that leaves the reader breathless. If there’s a noticeable difference this time around, it’s that the sentences do not even stop; periods are dispensed with until the end of the chapter, eight, ten, twenty pages later, the emotions being too raw to interrupt and the outpouring itself an essential part of the form. It takes a shift in time and place, typically, from the narrator’s overheated compartment in the train to a scene from his childhood or a memory of his lover, to warrant that kind of punctuation.
One of the tell-tale signs of European writing, or more specifically the writing coming out of Germany, is its wariness of optimism. In the tradition of Brecht, Adorno, and Mann, Sajko refuses to adopt a sunny outlook, the superficial kind sold to consumers by corporations, and presents, instead, the darker reality that outlook tends to mask. The narrator’s father was a violent, volatile man who died alone, not so long ago, in a shack that shared a wall with a pigsty, his body discovered only two weeks later after his feet had been chewed off by the starving pigs. This was a man he never wanted to emulate, perhaps a factor in his decision to become a writer and to write about the injustices he witnessed in the world, and the need to fight for freedom and equality, a sustainable economy, the crisis of democracy, the unity of Europe. For many years he fought with his only weapon, a pen, “for a better world with beautifully crafted words”, believing himself to be “a good man with good intentions”, until he realized he could not monetize his ideals, nor properly love the woman who loved him, and so his life collapsed.
The words in Every Time We Say Goodbye flow on the page like a river in springtime, so natural and powerful that readers might not realize they weren’t written in English.
Translated by Mima Simić, Sajko’s longtime translator, the words in Every Time We Say Goodbye flow on the page like a river in springtime, so natural and powerful that readers might not realize they weren’t written in English. The sombre spirit is captured, the despair relayed, yet for all its bleakness this is not a depressing book. Near the end, in what might be called a hopeful moment, the narrator recognizes he’s become a stranger, and that only by making a journey to Berlin might he “catch a glimpse of himself again…maybe at the intersection where Potsdamer Strasse stretches into Hauptstrasse, where she held my hand and told me Bowie had lived close by, at number 155, wrote his best songs there and saved himself from addiction.” In this way, this artist might fix himself too, or save what parts are left to be saved. The river taking the reader this far has an energizing effect.
Ivana Sajko, born in Zagreb in 1975, is a writer, theatre director and performer, working in the overlapping fields of literature, performance art and music. She is an author of five highly-praised novels and dozens of political theatre pieces, among which Woman-bomb gained international success. Her many awards include the Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et Lettres and the HKW Internationaler Literaturpreis. She lives in Berlin.
Mima Simić is a Croatian writer, an award-winning film critic, translator and political activist. Her short stories have been included in numerous anthologies and have been adapted for radio, TV and animated film. Her translations include works of fiction, non-fiction, literary theory, screenplays and films. She lives and works in Berlin.
Publisher: Biblioasis (March 3, 2026)
Paperback 8″ x 5″ | 200 pages
ISBN: 9781771966887
Pamela Hensley is the managing editor of yolk literary journal. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize, The New Quarterly's Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, and the Malahat Review's Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction. She is the creator and host of the podcast How I Wrote This and a member of the board of the Quebec Writers' Federation.
