Benjamin Bajramović’s debut novel Itake is a masterfully executed work that captures the voice of an entire generation. Of the four perspectives through which the novel unfolds, three belong to fictional characters shaped by the post-war youth of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Jakov’s departure to Germany forces Maša, Nećko, and Delboj to confront their own unresolved existential positions. At the same time, the mosaic of their individual stories points to a far deeper social problem: a whole generation lives in a state of constant existential anxiety, unable to articulate it fully, weighed down by the immense traumas of the guardian generation before them, against which their own crises feel unworthy.
Bajramović’s extraordinary talent can be felt most clearly in his subtle authorial choices. The weight of inherited trauma is not addressed directly but emerges through relationships: Maša and her mother, Nećko and his father and stepmother, Delboj and his aunt, and through the absence of certain figures, such as Maša’s father or Delboj’s parents. Yugonostalgia itself appears both as a burdensome inherited category and as a self-created mythical utopia, pieced together from other people’s memories. This duality is symbolically rendered in the defaced Rade Končar elevator, in Nećko’s spitball attacks on a poster of Zdravko Čolić, and in countless other details scattered throughout the novel.
Every one of Bajramović’s narrative choices in Itake feels fully justified. Three distinct narrative styles—differing in syntax, rhythm, and imagery—are finely attuned to the psychological profiles of the characters. The repetition of scenes and dialogues never feels redundant but instead draws the reader’s attention to hidden details. Secondary characters are not merely devices to keep the story moving; each opens new possibilities for ethical reflection on both the characters and the society they inhabit. The novel’s complex composition never weighs down the reading experience; on the contrary, Jakov’s tale of a dog that lost its tail, threaded through the three narratives, functions as a symbolic analogy of the generation’s unspoken frustration, as well as a signal that one scene has reached closure and the author is moving to the next.
All this, and much more that could be said, confirms Itake as a novel of remarkable aesthetic value, ethical weight, and above all, a source of rare and unique reading pleasure.
