Anja is a Catholic peasant in what has become Yugoslavia, now a ravaged territory claimed by the Soviets in the aftermath of the second World War. As the authorities begin cracking down on religious and ethnic minorities, her family’s farm—and their entire way of life—is increasingly endangered. But taking a job with the powers-that-be in a nearby factory town carries its own set of fears, anxieties, and secrets.
Exploring a moment in history largely ignored in English-language media, Daniel Jakacic’s ANJA, AGAINST THE ODDS thrives on the hyper-specificity of its setting: not only 1950s Yugoslavia, still reeling from Nazi war crimes and battered by Soviet occupation, but the experience of a Catholic peasant girl fundamentally at odds with the professed secular-humanism of the Soviet regime. American discourse tends to forget things that are small, complicated, or both, and Anja’s story is both—lending it a compelling novelty to many readers. The unique cultural markers are pleasant and rich. An early celebration of a White Sunday festival, for instance, is demonstrative: redolent with traditional foodstuffs, folk costume, and dance, it’s also a tense reminder of how a formerly-religious festival of the peasantry has been co-opted by a nationalist program. Anja is, furthermore, an 18-year-old girl, and this complicates her story. She often finds herself confronted by men with power, and the threat of violence remains very real (“Part of me was still looking over my shoulder for Nazis,” she notes), here with the added emotional valence of erotic threat. Any time a man’s gaze lingers a little too long, he may be a leering predator—or he may be an informer for the state. This pervasive feeling of paranoia and danger is rendered in confident, sharp prose—sometimes with an incisive world-weariness (“The Communists did their best to flatter their former enemies [the Nazis] by imitating them”), sometimes with remarks of startling poetry (“Like a sweet savage, I tore them open in song”).
ANJA, AGAINST THE ODDS does have some flaws in its storytelling. The book is written in the past tense—an older narrator is reflecting on her youth—but at times, the wiser, more urbane tone of the narration slips into the dialogue in turns of phrase that are tonally inappropriate for a teenaged peasant girl. Lines like “Walking back toward us, Mum kept looking back, waving her arms in hopelessness, her face contorted with grief” are fine prose, but they don’t feel naturalistic in dialogue between siblings. Often in the same breath, ANJA frequently falls into the trap of “as-you-know” storytelling, in which one or more characters retells an event to others who were themselves present. It’s sometimes thinly veiled as being for the benefit of a nearby third party, but it feels transparent, and these sections are unquestionably weaker than the conventional narrative.
Perhaps most disappointingly, the overall plot arc feels unfulfilled. A few cryptic remarks near the end feel like a potential pivot towards a thread of science fiction within the historical tapestry, but this possibility doesn’t have time to develop before an abrupt, violent climax. It’s unclear if this would have been a profitable turn for the story, but the appearance of unresolved foreshadowing may still nag the reader.
Nonetheless, ANJA, AGAINST THE ODDS remains a potent, thrilling, and human reflection on the oft-forgotten casualties of ideological warfare.
Daniel Jakacic’s ANJA, AGAINST THE ODDS is a compelling exploration of an under-appreciated pocket of history.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader