Holograms of Fear - Hardcover

In her first novel to be translated into English, a Croatian journalist and frequent contributor to the Nation offers a deceptively simple plot: a women suffering from a life-threatening kidney disease is cured when she receives an organ transplant. The illness is a metaphor; as Drakulic's narrator sifts through the minutiae of details involving the operation and her recovery, she explores what it means to be a woman, both alone and in relation to her family. The novel segues between the narrator's growing up in Yugoslavia and her present life as a patient in a Boston hospital. She relives a suicide attempt and an emotional confrontation with an abusive father, and examines the troubling bond between mothers and daughters--her longing for approval from a beautiful but distant mother, and her ambiguous relationship with her own teenage daughter, whom she has essentially abandoned in Zagreb. The narrator confronts all her demons, one by one, including the most powerful one--her fear of death. Although small in scope, the novel is beautifully conceived, well executed and satisfying.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Croatian journalist Drakuli (How We Survived Communism, 1991--not reviewed), her first novel to be translated into English. Here, illness, its sensation and its isolation, is the theme--about a diabetic Croatian woman who's living in New York more or less alone (her daughter's been left back in Europe), waiting for a call to Boston and the summons to a kidney transplant that will perhaps save her life. As the book begins, this call has come, and what follows is a nearly moment-by-moment account of the sensation of dread, physical discomfort, mental dissociation, and spiritual need that the malfunctioning body imposes on a person: ``I must weave circles around myself and maybe that way I can enclose time. Little ones to begin and then larger. Time passes through me. I feel it making me heavy. But I can't hold on to it. I am not in it. There is no Me.'' Phenomenologically accurate as all this is, be warned that it makes for sludgy fiction: claustrophobic, repetitious, and thoroughly dispiriting. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.