Word: roza
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...problems of the everyday. But sometimes it can take you to a place more menacing than the one you are trying to escape. It is escapism that leads Chris, a fortysomething traveling salesman trapped in a loveless, sexless marriage, to a street corner in north London. There, he propositions Roza, an illegal Yugoslav immigrant in her 20s, who has donned a short skirt and fur jacket merely to see what trouble she can stir. She invites him to her dingy basement apartment for coffee and starts telling him about her life as the daughter of a communist partisan. They forge...
Best known for the romantic World War II epic Captain Corelli's Mandolin, which has sold more than 3 million copies in the U.K. alone, De Bernières in A Partisan's Daughter departs from what he describes as his usual "complicated, Latinate" writing style. He allows Roza and Chris to alternate in telling their stories, using their own raw and candid language. As a result, the novel reads like a memoir, which is fitting since De Bernières says Roza is the literary incarnation of a Serbian housemate he lived with in the late '70s. "When...
...Roza gives Chris the adventure he craves, her stories sparking what he calls a "buzzing in my groin." She speaks of her tough upbringing in Belgrade with her one-eyed father, a decorated communist hero who cut off the fingers of several Croats. She becomes the counterpoint to everything middle-class and politically correct, comparing Albanians to apes and taunting Chris with accounts of her sexual exploits. He breathes in every detail as fodder for his fantasies. "I only wanted to sleep with her, really, but when you're fascinated by a woman you'll settle for her stories...
...solace the characters seek in one another slowly blurs into something deeper, obscuring the lines between lust and love. De Bernières uses their emotional confusion to comment on the power of storytelling, and its effects on the storyteller. Roza begins to worry that Chris will lose interest in her, so her stories grow ever more fanciful: in one, she gains passage on a ship by seducing the captain with her cooking. It's a tension that reflects De Bernières' friendship with the real Roza, who vanished from his life three decades ago: "Even today...
Ultimately, it doesn't matter. It's made clear from the start that Chris and Roza's relationship will not last - and their separation resonates with the sorrow of what could have been. That regret keeps Roza in Chris' life, but only as a character in his story. Memories aren't important, Roza once told him. But in the end, they are all he has left...