From EEG by Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth, New York, New Directions, 2018
The main character in this novel and the one before it (Belladonna), Andreas Ban, looks back over his life and details the many pains he experienced. Some of the pain was physical from cancer, spinal degeneration, and other chronic ailments. Some of the pain was psychic from searing losses (wife, mother), battles with health care institutions, banishments from jobs in academia and journalism, and memories of atrocities during World War II and the break up of Yugoslavia.
The following excerpt is from the opening of the novel where Andreas Ban reflects on suicide and references his own attempt covered in the prior novel Belladonna. He urges us to think about suicide as more than the sudden and violent forms we commonly think of it as, and to consider the more insidious forms that sneak up on its victims.
Of course I didn’t kill myself.
p. 1
Although silent suicides lurk all around. They skulk. Silent suicides are not violent suicides, they are gradual, ongoing. My sister Ada is killing herself silently. And I sometimes kill myself slowly, I go through phases, then I pull myself together, get over it. Eating too much can be a silent suicide, as can starvation, often observed in ambitious and insecure anorexics or old people who have lost their teeth and their place in life, so they stare at the TV screen, eating bananas and ice cream, if they can afford them. But starvation can also be forced, when people are killed by someone else (silent murder), when people don’t want to be hungry.
