Marica Bodrožić

Arjeta grew up in Sarajevo, studied in Paris and has been living in Berlin for five years. On her long wanderings, she has lost many things: the certainty of curiously learning about the world near and far, the confidence that the past would remain alive in her memory, and above all Yugoslavia and her happy childhood in that multinational state. (…) But across all these years, she has managed to rescue one item - her grandmother’s table … (…) It is so important for the new novel by Marica Bodrožić, who was born in Dalmatia in 1973 and who has been living in Germany since she was nine, that it even features in the title of her novel Kirschholz und alte Gefühle (Cherry Wood and Old Feelings). Arjeta has just moved again, and there is almost nothing in her new, empty Berlin apartment except the cherry wood table on which, in a moment, she will be able to spread out the photographs that have come together in her travel luggage over the years. (…) The table demonstrates the connection between the past and the present, between Sarajevo, Paris and Berlin, and that Arjeta’s life, which is threatening to fall apart, does form a unity after all. The first-person narrator is in her late thirties when she tries to sort out her memories a little in her new apartment, relying on little more than her language, her gift for observation and dreamy contemplation – and the table.

Karl-Markus Gauss: “Pausen im Gedächtnis”
© Süddeutsche Zeitung, 4 February 2013