Tanja Stupar–Trifunović, Since I Bought A Swan,  Rare Swan Press. Tr. Peter Penda

Reviewed by Nicholas Birns

New York University

Since I Bought A Swan is a taut, emotionally involving, intense, and highly contemporary novel. Its protagonist and narrator is a middle-aged female librarian who, in her youth, had married her older professor. Now, unexpectedly, she conceives a passion or, and enters into an intense affair with, a female student young enough to be her daughter. The younger woman is  also involved with men: first an actor in Belgrade, and then a man in France named Robert. The older woman, after the breakup of the brief but significant love affair, takes up with a woman somewhat closer in age named Maria.

     The plot, as summarized above, is not unimportant to Since I Bought A Swan, Indeed, although neo hesitates to classify the novel as ‘autofiction’ given how nearly meaningless the label has become Since I Bought A Swan has some of the freedom to be concerned with feelings and events—notwithstanding a highly modernist self-awareness and allusiveness—that the genre of autofiction, as practiced by writers such as Rachel Cusk or Olivia Laing, has achieved. Readers looking for a purely experimental, non-referential experience will be disappointed in this book. It is full of thoughts, emotions, feelings, places, and bodies. On the other hand, though the novel is highly literary. Not only are there allusions to many writers, particularly modern writers in French (Baudelaire. Malraux_ Beckett) but the novel is composed in a rhetorical internalized way. When the older woman addresses the younger woman, in her presence and absence, it is sometimes as if she addresses aspects of her younger self. What on one reading might seem an interpersonal exchange becomes on another a self-interrogation. “I often thought it would be better,” muses the narrator, “if we left our love as a permanent fantasy, imprisoned in the bookish or film atmosphere, just as sweet to wish it again and far enough not to revive it” (123).  As it stands, Since I Bought A Swan occupies a sort of liminal space between imagination and reality, self-consciousness and social relationships. The actor with whom the younger woman takes up, for instance, could be seen as simply an embodiment of toxic masculinity, and a warning that such modes of behavior are to be found even in spheres like the artistic and theatrical which like to think they have transcended such flaws. But there is also a sense in which the actor mirrors the narrator, in performing deeds that are scripted, being nonetheless a sentient, conscious entity, but not perhaps fully able to extricate one from the other. I was reminded a bit of the late Australian writer Gillian Mears, especially her 1991 novel The Mint Lawn, which explores how a young woman’s relationship with an older man both masked her incipient queer sexuality and stood in the way of her full artistic and emotional self-expression. It is not just the narrative ingredients that are similar, but a sense of the relationship of the experimental and imagination; although Stupar–Trifunović’s style is much more modernist and introspective than Mears’s social and psychological realism. Virginia Woolf’s life and work are overtly mentioned in the novel, and the commitment of Since  I Bought A Swan to both the freedom of the inner life and the necessities of the outer world is very much along the lines of the vision achieved in Woolf’s work.

       Indeed, the narrative perspective in Since I Bought A Swan is more important than any of the particular events it chronicles. The narrator is depicted as sexually expressed in somewhat stereotypical terms (some librarians do have sex lives!) and her discovery of her romantic interest in women is an emotional breakthrough that makes this book something of a coming-out story. Ably and smoothly translated into English by Petar Penda, the language is accessible and involving, while retaining an edge of imprecision that spurs the reader to subject it to active interrogation.

   Though the social background of Since I Bought a Swan is only lightly sketched, the present-day level takes place in Serbia and Bosnia after the breakup of Yugoslavia. When the younger woman moves to France and takes up with Robert, some international themes come into play. Robert is of French-Italian descent, and it is implied the younger woman has partially entered into a relationship with him because he has access to the educational and social system of Western Europe’s Robert, metaphorically, thus stands not only for the heterosexual norm but for a diasporic movement in a different context. if so, though, this movement is fraught with difficulty. “Robert’s family is not delighted, you are a foreigner, from Bosnia as well, they think we are killing each other, which is not far from the truth, and that you haven’t known each other long enough…” (138). Since I  Bought a Swan inconspicuously but effectively depicts the post-Yugoslav world as a place where people are trying to live everyday lives and make, as it were, everyday self-discoveries, even as convulsive as those the narrator makes about her character and sexuality, which at once could happen anywhere but are particularly tinged by a social and historical context that is lightly sketched but near absent. The narrator indeed is poised between universality and specificity in a way characteristic of the fiction of intimacy, as if intimacy needs both nearness and distance, detail and abstraction.

      Stupar–Trifunović’s novel is also a rare example of a book largely concerned with sex and sexual relationships that is yet not meant to be titillating e to be a young person’s book. Indeed, the narrator being somewhat idler someone who has lived and had to reflect and to be disappointed, is at the heart of the novel’s success. Though the narrator’s voice is not self-hating or self-condemning, it is self-scrutinizing. And,  in ethical and moral terms, asks a lot of itself. It is never pleading or demanding, and it does not seek justification.  That the narrator’s relationship with the younger woman is partly internal and partly external, partly a flesh-and-blood erotic engagement and partially a dialogue between two aspects of the same self, makes Since I Bought A Swan accessible in both contemplative and visceral terms. The book also explores how being in love with someone younger represents a yearning for lost or bungled beginnings, in the case of the narrator for the sexually liberated behavior from which they felt precluded. Yet being in love with somebody younger can also involve a sense of the ignorance and callowness of the younger person. For instance. The younger woman clearly does not understand the compromises people of the older generation had to make under Communism. The narrator implores the younger woman “not to reduce all these different lives to common phenomena” (119). However disappointed the narrator might be by life, she has gained from it a sense of life’s sheer complexity, and its inability to be reduced to a single meaning. The reader, in turn, gains a sense of the infinite ramifications of experience. This conceptual gain is all the more tangible as it has been so situated in a particular life and a particular set of feelings and sensations.