Breast Cancer Survival
Review of the Peirene Press paperback edition (October 4, 2022) translated by Celia Hawkesworth from the Bosnian language original "Kintsugi tijela" (2018)

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with liquid gold, to highlight and celebrate an object’s past. - from the book synopsis of Body Kintsugi

The anaesthetist is above your head. His face is anxious, vigilant, concentrated. Your life is in his hands. You'll fall asleep quickly, into a sleep that will enable the operation, which will go perfectly. Before you fall asleep, you look at him and say, 'You know that moment when Charlie Brown says to Snoopy: "We'll all die one day, Snoopy!" And Snoopy replies: "True, but all the other days we won't."
He looks at you in disbelief. His expression begins to change. You've already fallen asleep, but you're quite certain he's laughing. - excerpt from Body Kintsugi

Body Kintsugi is Bosnian author Senka Maric's non-fiction novel about her harrowing journey through breast cancer and her path to survival. It is traumatic and does not make for easy reading. Along the way she endures several partial, then whole mastectomies, various prosthetic implantations and removals, infections and their aftermath, eventual hysterectomy and all the various chemotherapy required in between procedures. But there are moments of relief and of course you know that since the book exists, she will survive in the end.

See book cover at http://www.ampimargini.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Senka-Mari_Body-Kintsugi-1...
Cover image of the original Bosnian language edition. Image sourced from Ampi Margini Literary Agency.

Inter-chapters have Maric remembering the days of her youth, her first terrors of menstruation, the comfort of her grandfather, the ordeals of her father's alcoholism and eventual sickness and death, her mother's own breast cancer survival. She hallucinates about being visited by women of mythology, Medea, Medusa and Amazon Queen Penthesilea. I don't know the tie-ins of the first two, but I remember from somewhere (was it a Natalie Haynes book?) that Amazon mythology had them cutting off one of their own breasts, in order to better draw their bowstrings.

In terms of rating, the difficulty of the journey does not make for light recommendation. But the honesty and rawness make for a 5-star rating with the reservation that not everyone will necessarily be able to handle it.

I read Body Kintsugi through to my subscription to Peirene Press. Subscribers receive the publisher's books several weeks ahead of their official release date.

Other Reviews
Review by Eleanor Updegraff at Lunate.co.uk, October 7, 2022.
Review by Beth Wren at Forever on a Lilo, October 31, 2022.
Write-up at Ampi Margini Literary Agency, Undated 2022. ( )