Angel with a Flower on Her Chest

In Late Summer by Magdalena Blažević, trans. Anđelka Raguž. 176 pp. Linden Editions, 2025. £12.

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In late summer 2005, I disembarked in the city of Mostar after a three- or four-hour bus ride from Dubrovnik, the vaunted pearl of the Adriatic in neighboring Croatia. The wars that had dismantled Yugoslavia in the first half of the 1990s felt distant—the Dayton Accords, which established peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina, had been signed ten years earlier, almost half of my lifetime. In my first minutes in that country, in Mostar, I encountered a woman selling flowers from a stand beside the road. I no longer can envision the contours of her face or the colors of the blooms she positioned so beautifully for sale, but the tenacity and poise I saw in the woman—who seemed unmoved by the day’s heat and undaunted by her dearth of customers—wavers in my mind twenty years later. To protect herself from the sun, she stood in the shadow of a building whose bombed-out concrete walls concealed its original function entirely.

I traced my route, using the small, printed map in my travel guide, toward Stari Most, a famous bridge in the heart of the old city, and found a cafe with outdoor seating alongside the Neretva River. Over a plate of Bosnian cheese and a spread of grilled eggplant, tomato, white peppers, and zucchini, I read how the bridge forged trade and interactions across the region’s shared religious identities for centuries until its shelling in 1993, an attack that the International Criminal Tribunal later prosecuted as a war crime for intentional destruction of cultural heritage. Its reconstruction, which happened the year before my visit, was a sign of renewed connections between the majority-Catholic Croatian-Bosnian population and the Bozniaks, most of whom are Muslim. With little audience beyond myself, a shirtless man climbed onto the ledge of the bridge, raised his arms upward, took a breath, and leapt, hurtling toward the water until he broke its surface.

“Look!” I thought to myself. Mostar-based Magdalena Blažević begins her novel In Late Summer, translated from the Croatian by Anđelka Raguž, with the same awed utterance as she resurrects the atmosphere of an unnamed Bosnian village at the height of the war. The narrator, the fourteen-year-old Ivana, turns briefly to the past, seven years earlier. She introduces her doll, Julija; revels in the warmth of her parents’ mattress, where their bodies had just rested; and breathes in the scent of “roses and sweetened boiled milk” from her mother’s scarf hanging on the frame of a mirror. Her father is a truck driver and has brought her a hard-boiled sweet from his most recent trip. Ivana savors its cherry flavor. Her mother warns her not to eat while lying down, but it’s too late: the hard candy lodges in her throat. As her parents struggle to help, her breathing stops. But don’t fret prematurely, Ivana tells us. Her father’s fingers push deeper, blindly, until he succeeds in extracting the source of trouble. “This isn’t the end,” Ivana notes. “It can’t be. I’ve got another seven years of life ahead of me.” Thus the beginning reveals much about the conclusion: In Late Summer bears witness to the familiar, routine moments of Ivana’s final months while remaining alert to her approaching end.

Not only a fact of life or state of being, Death is a character from the start. Before we meet him (for here Death is in no uncertain terms a man), we’re granted glimpses of his arrival: he comes with “a gentle face,” wearing a “cocked cap” that Ivana sees as “soft and dark green like forest moss.” The natural world surrounding the village gives the imaginings of childhood plenty of room to play. The “sharp serrated leaves” of wild chestnut trees cloak the homes of squirrels above; when Ivana finds the babies fallen to the ground, their broken bodies remind her of newborn piglets, only blind. The sight recalls for her a time when her grandmother’s sow suffered from “red swollen teats.” Since the pig could no longer nurse her young, Ivana’s grandfather “heaped the piglets into the wheelbarrow and emptied them into the hole by the train tracks,” a place, she notes, where “we throw everything that dies.” Even their sources of water are haunted by Death: when Ivana visits a nearby spring to fill her family’s bottles, the water spurts from the narrow pipe “like blood from a just-cut chicken neck.”

Against this backdrop of hovering violence, Ivana’s family strives in their way to provide a refuge and semblance of normalcy, their residence tended as a place of safety, at some remove from the spiraling conflict off-stage. Mortified after her mother bathes her in a tub where her peers can see, Ivana puts on a striped purple outfit that all the other village girls wear too—clothing given by a Catholic aid agency. The color may be cheerful, Ivana says, but her cousin Dunja notes its resemblance to “prison clothing.”

Beneath an apple tree, the girls break away from the incarceration of their circumstances. With Julija beside them, they daydream a bench into a bus, and away they go to see the sites of what was their unified country before the wars: “Dunja drives us from one city to another, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Belgrade. When we move out, we’ll go there together. We’ll sit on hotel terraces in city centers in beautiful dresses and shoes with bows, eat cakes, and listen to music.”

What should be a reasonable vision of the future will remain an unrealized fantasy for Ivana. “Get ready!” she tells us as Death approaches from deep in the forest. “We’re running out of time.” Even after the clarity of that warning, time seems to pass too quickly. The short vignettes that anchor each chapter do not offer hope for Ivana’s future—instead, they hold close to the present while it lasts. The footsteps come for her, in the end, from the “dense undergrowth chilled by hemlock. . . .” With “the moss a green carpet,” their sound goes unheard at first, despite the caution of “the soft flight of the night owl.” As Ivana dwells in the airiness that she finds “among the chestnuts and oaks,” “a hellish roar” coupled with the scent of gunpowder breaks the last vestiges of her peace—the announcement of “male bodies” that “don’t hesitate,” with a burst that reminds her of the Bosna River and the “monsters” of a local boy’s stories. “Come out! They won’t hurt you!” a woman from the village calls. But Ivana is wrenched from her home and lined up outside, beside her family. Death stands behind her, beneath her grandmother’s apple tree. Then there is only “silence in the blink of an eye.”

But Ivana’s end is not the end, for in the crawl of time and its disorientation during the moments around Death’s arrival, in her attempt to burrow for safety within the protective layers of childhood before she falls to the ground as “a white angel with a flower on her chest,” we see her mother, her father, her brother, her grandmother, and her grandfather captured in simply heart-stopping prose as they struggle with and against the unstoppable. But Death is not a hard candy that tastes of cherry. It is a boy doing the work of men, a senseless act, an everyday that becomes forever-after.

In a postscript interview, Raguž reflects on this, her first experience with literary translation. Having migrated from Australia to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1990, two years before the war, Raguž describes her effort to prevent her own experiences from intruding on the text, while recognizing that Ivana’s story is only one fictional account among “bitter memories of friends and relatives who lost their lives, of friends who suffer from PTSD, of the lives destroyed by the war, of people who were forced to leave their homes, of the generations who lost their innocence.” Blažević—a student of Raguž’s two decades before at the University of Mostar—conveys this innocence and its theft in spectacular form, and Raguž captures her achievement in language at once spare and supple, entrancing and excruciating. Raguž says she avoids literal translations, which would have erred toward “There is/are” constructions, to deliver sentence fragments that in English reflect a child’s perspective beautifully. She also describes the care taken to stay consistent when images recur before and after “they came”—even when, for example, the “mirror” of an uncovered well, in war time, reveals only darkness. Such correspondences and repetitions, as she says, have a “deeply unsettling effect on the reader.”

“Before the war” was a phrase I heard often in Mostar. A T-shirt vendor recalled working at a large company with colleagues of different religious and ethnic backgrounds. Another man mourned the pride he’d felt in the former Yugoslav national football (soccer) team. A woman told me she’d been friends with her next-door neighbor until her neighbor’s son shot her husband dead. She found him lying in front of their home at night, at first thinking him to be drunk. As I walked through the city’s streets, I saw the bullet-strewn facade of the rectory beside a Catholic church. On the other side of the river, many of the headstones alongside a mosque bore the same date of death; almost all of the buried would have been my age. When I reached Bosnia’s capital a few days later, I noticed red splotches of resin scattered on the footpaths. “Sarajevo roses,” somebody explained to me, placed to remember the people killed where we were walking.

“Look!” It may be too late to warn the dead but not to stave off a similar fate for us, the living—work that’s all the more urgent given the rise in ethnonationalism and our penchant for abstracting the language of war. Through the humanity Blažević grants to Ivana—one child to represent untold thousands—Blažević limns the true human costs and enduring consequences. “Everyone is a victim and repercussions are still felt on both a personal and social level long after the peace agreement has been signed and decades have passed,” Raguž writes in her end notes. “War leaves nobody indifferent or unscathed.”