Bucheon City of Literature

A beautiful and moving inquiry into identity, origins, loss, and humanity

The novel begins in March 2018 with the narrator (and author) Saša Stanišić’s grandmother Kristina, who has dementia, and a résumé he wrote by hand ten years earlier when applying for German citizenship; it concludes with his grandmother's funeral in November 2018. The story ends up being a search for answers to three questions. The résumé prompts the narrator to ask who he is, a visit to his ancestral village and his grandmother's fading memory raise questions about where he comes from, and the funeral leads him to wonder whether, perhaps, all of this is actually who he is.