I'll give this three and a half stars as I had to relinquish it halfway through.It's not that it was a bad book, it has many merits in fact. In a sense it's a very important book, as it details the horrors of Nazi and Communist occupation in Latvia during the war. And its style is distinctive and engaging, informally introducing topics, sometimes favouring a complex style that requires the reader to hold several aspects of a topic at once, at other times being quite terse and pointed. A lot of research went into the book with an encylopaedic knowledge of chess champions and their singular psychological characteristics. Unfortunately though, the weight of the relentless negativity of subject matter dragged me down. I do often enjoy the misanthropy of one of her literary forerunners, Thomas Bernhard. It's amusing. But here it can be exhausting. If it had been shorter it might have been fine but big tomes are an occasional project for me rather than a daily activity. So, recommended for historians and voracious readers of intellectual doorstoppers, but not for everyone. ( )

Drndić uses a reader-baffling technique a little like W G Sebald's in her fiction: she mixes fictional characters with family photos, descriptions of real events and people, tables of historical data, references to books and websites, and so on, constantly reminding us that it's our responsibility as readers to test the trustworthiness of sources. We know that her pessimistic and sometimes paranoid narrator, the clinical-psychologist-turned-writer Andreas Ban (also the narrator of Belladonna), is not Daša Drndić. Except that a lot of the time he obviously is expressing things that she feels very strongly about, and at least some of his friends and the people he admires seem to be people with connections to the author...

The book ranges widely over different topics — the Nazi genocide in the Balkans, Latvia and occupied France, the role of chess-players on both sides in the war, the aftermath of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the intolerance and rabid nationalism of the new Croatia, the random and devastating ways mental and physical illnesses destroy the lives of ordinary people, and much else. Ban confronts us with a lot of hard and unpleasant historical realities, and castigates the world for its reluctance to acknowledge past evils and punish those responsible. And for our amnesia concerning the debts we owe to the past, especially the way the successor-states to Yugoslavia try to erase memories of the struggle for liberation from fascism.

A dark, difficult book, but a very rewarding one: I'm only sorry to discover Drndić so late. ( )

Last June, Daša Drndić joined the pantheon of great novelists who are dead. Oh, how it can seem all good novels are written by dead novelists, how I wish I could have read this when she was still alive!

E.E.G. is both separate and a continuation from 'part one' Belladonna and it captures in a more crucial sense than the previous that the individual must protect itself and provide nourishment via the history of the footsteps that the individual has taken. To relate to Soviet chess players, to a psychiatric patient who has set them-self on a quest to help the town's pigeons, to the novel showing it's own awareness multiple times, and not even in a smarmy 'oh isn't this fourth-wall breaking so clever, where is my round of applause' but in way that feels logical as what else can we do when we reach a certain point in our minds we recite ourselves, we reference to our condition of the present, this novel muses on the power of the 'I' and does it so well because it investigates it.

This is not a novel about embracing 'the end', but a novel that embraces the dissolution of the self, because we all live on for an imprecise amount of time that is not in our control, or even through the actions we take, but through the collective memory of the societies that we create and are indebted to our own memories.

Isn't it predictable that we always end with death? ( )