“Bodrozic, mediated by Ellen Elias-Bursac’s assured translation, chronicles what a country chooses to remember, and what it consciously forgets, with confidence and grace.”
Sarah Weinman | New York Times Book Review
“We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day is a masterful refection of one country’s reality, a septic pit in which crime, false war merits, actual profiteering, political menace cloaked in cheap patriotism, bloodstained secrets of recent past and hypocrisy coming from those offering a bright future, are being fermented and accumulated. It is a novel created from skillfully combining press clippings from crime chronicles with high politics in which, similarly to the Croatian reality, everything is mixed in the same blender producing a revolting spew that induces nausea. Ivana Bodrožić takes the bull by the horns, dealing with subjects considered taboo as well as “the untouchable sanctities”, by placing them in a familiar mundane setting, not only geographically, but also under those time coordinates that we usually call – our reality.”
Drago Hedl | writer
“The readers that keep up with Croatian society and politics will easily recognize bits and pieces of stories they already know. They will recognize politicians who were ordering murders during the war, majors who show their surgical wounds on television, councilors taping bribe offers, school scandals, sex scandals… But, don’t be fooled, Ivana Bodrožić’s novel We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day is not yet another roman à clef in which the author leads us with a single allegory through the everyday political landscape to which we are already exposed. We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day is much more. A cry of outrage. A darksome lament over one’s single space and homeland that rose to mythical proportions. Over a homeland that, despite all this, fades into oblivion and sinks in despair once the patriotic phrases are stripped off. A homeland in which everything perishes, except for rivaling nationalistic oligarchies who need one another to survive. We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day is, simply said, a novel about Croatia and therefore it is a crime story.”
Jurica Pavičić | writer
