Body Kintsugi by Senka Marić (tr. Celia Hawkesworth)
Review by Eleanor Updegraff
Kintsugi: the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with lacquer and powdered platinum, silver or gold. In this centuries-old technique, breakage becomes a thing of beauty, scars no longer signs of weakness but features to be admired. Senka Marić’s Body Kintsugi, in a sensitive English translation by Celia Hawkesworth, is a searing tale of chronic illness in which the idea of kintsugi looms large, a powerful metaphor that offers a guide to how we might read not just this particular story, but all narratives of sickness and injury.
Marić’s first novel – and debut appearance in English – chronicles a forty-two-year-old woman’s battle with breast cancer, a disease she has feared would catch up with her ever since her mother was diagnosed with it sixteen years ago. Discovering a lump in her breast one night just a couple of months after her husband leaves her, she embarks on a dizzying journey through the hospitals of Zagreb and Sarajevo, subjected to biopsies, mastectomies and implants, chemotherapy and dangerous infection.
Marić’s writing is intimate and visceral, at times unnervingly factual – she includes short medical reports and explanations of chemo drugs – but generally heavy with emotion, an unrelenting tide that propels our protagonist from defiance to exhaustion, fear to hope, bewildered disbelief to elated love. Sometimes humorous, often heart-breaking, Body Kintsugi is above all unexpectedly gripping, inviting the reader to step into the main character’s shoes and take up arms in the fight to reclaim her body.
Presented in short chapters that come thicker and faster as the cancer progresses, the novel also charts who our protagonist was before her dreaded diagnosis. Two relationships prove key in this respect: not, as we might assume, with her husband or beloved children, but instead with her abusive, alcoholic father, and with her own body. In the case of the former, the narrative moves fluidly between past and present, dipping effortlessly into memories and dreams, and employing a mixture of tenses that reflects how profound experiences – particularly those of childhood – never really leave us. To use the corporeal language typical of the novel, ‘time is a gut twisted into a knot’; stirred up by her repeated visits to hospital, the past intrudes on the protagonist’s present in vivid, often violent scenes, many of them even harder to read than Marić’s unsparing descriptions of invasive treatments and collapsed veins.
From the outset of the novel, the protagonist’s relationship with her body is a defining feature of her life, and this is where the concept of kintsugi comes in most powerfully. Initially dismayed that she will have to lose at least one breast, and terrified that the cancer might spread, she goes in search of private healthcare through which she can opt for a double mastectomy and reconstruction with prostheses. Learning to love her new body – including its foreign implants – is at first a struggle, but soon, as the cancer takes hold, her perception of her physical identity begins to alter. Later, we will encounter her proudly baring her shaved head instead of wearing a wig, tracing scars as a map of her personal history, finding comfort and strength in both her lover’s and her children’s arms.
Marić throws these scenes of illness and tentative recovery into sharp relief against the protagonist’s memories of adolescence – another process of terrifying physical change, which she looks back on as something to be ‘survived’. The reader is left to muse on the human body in all its intense fragility and surprising power: How much of what we call our selves is physical, and how much in the mind? The answer seems to shift throughout the novel, as the vortex of illness grows ever wider.
Body Kintsugi is raw and unflinching, set on hospital wards and bathroom tiles, filled with tears and skin and blood. We are aware of this from the outset, told early on: ‘This is a story about the body. Its struggle to feel whole while reality shatters it into fragments.’ Our protagonist is taken to very dark places; the terror she feels as she senses the end is conveyed starkly through Marić’s direct tone. Yet throughout even her lowest moments, there is a kind of beauty present, a hope that drips as slow and steady as the drugs entering her veins. This is a story about illness, yes, but also about recovery, and while kintsugi may feature only in its title, the concept is implicit on every page. Recovery is, in this novel at least, not a return to how things were before, but the taking of a scarred, bruised and fragmented body to display as something not quite whole, yet still entirely perfect.
Body Kintsugi is published by Peirene Press, 4th October 2022