Dasa Drndic

He closed the book, sat it face down on the table in front of him and thought “Well that was complicated”. For Sebastian, Dasa Drndic’s book was not complicated in a sense of her sentence construction or word choice, but in its actual composition. As he found himself in one single page going from reading long unpronounceable German names, with small double columned paragraph descriptions (pg. 222) to being thrown into a full page interview of a Jewish victim (pg. 222). However, it was still more complicated than this for even the interviews were not always from Jewish victims, nor from people who were actually still alive. For some of the interviews were from dead German “S.S.- Untersharfuhrers”, much like is seen in “Otto Richard Horns” interview

It is true that most writers will give him a general sense of how they want him to picture or create the character in his mind. For it is even present in Drndic’s story, “three innocent, golden-haired children” (pg. 241) but the rest is up to his imagination. This quote however, is one of the few instances when Drndic actually talks about specific features of her characters. By doing this it causes Sebastian to feel disconnected in a sense with the characters for he cannot picture them, there is no details for him to go off of and the only distinctions that he can make between them is what Drndic tells him. This information usually consists of a name, title, brief life history and ends either with their imprisonment or death, but rarely contains anything about their outward appearance. Like many other things in Drndic’s writing this is again seen in complete juxtaposition with actual photographs of the specific character(s) being addressed. Drndic does not include pictures for many of her characters, but for the few ones that she does it causes Sebastian to feel more connected to