These identity-defining characteristics will reverberate throughout the book, leaking information, determining welcomes or rejections. The randomness of the narrator’s interactions contrasts with the precision of the validations and exclusions afforded by nationality, language, or name. She must leave Rijeka, a port city on the Adriatic in the former Yugoslavia, and begin a journey to Canada. It’s a pity we couldn’t hear more from them, but the narrator is anxious to be going. They go to a cake shop together and the disjointed, absurd-seeming conversation continues. My mum sent me this, says the prostitute. She’s got a small pale yellow towel poking out of her bag. The sky is electric blue, says the old man. Each inhabits their own reality, allowing others a glimpse of the thoughts that generate their sense of the world. The best of these are the utterances of an old man and a prostitute as the narrator sits between them.

Her body may be present, walking toward departure points, but her mind is searching for associations, familiar recollections. In Daša Drndić’s 1998 novel Canzone di Guerra, available now in an English translation from Istros Books, the dilemmas of the displaced person are conveyed through the conflicted, racing mind of a narrator who is never quite where she seems to be.

The text could almost have been written by Beckett: AT THE OUTSET, we are confused, as we should be.

Daša drndić belladonna