Ivana Sajko's ​Love Novel

Reviewed by Alex Carrigan

(Biblioasis, 2024)

What is left to be said about the subject of love? After thousands of years of platitudes, romantic tales, and philosophical debates about the subject, it feels like there’s almost no part of love that hasn’t been dissected. To try and understand love is to try and figure out if it can be reexamined with changing socioeconomic climates and cultural attitudes, and to figure out how much of the idealism and cynicism regarding love will persist.

In Love Novel, Ivana Sajko presents a marriage that is in decline. Following a nameless couple in an unnamed European city, Sajko’s novel presents several mundane and bitter moments in their life as they deal with poverty, crushed dreams, and the struggles of raising a child in this quagmire. By presenting this marriage in its harshest moments, Sajko attempts to illustrate the vestiges of the romance that brought these two together, and raises a question as to whether or not love can truly die.

Love Novel feels almost cynically named once the reader takes their first look at the couple at the focus of the novel. The husband and wife are both people who put their energy, resources, and effort into passions that presented miniscule rewards once let out into the real world, with the husband an unemployed Dante scholar and the wife a wannabe actress making do with small-time commercial and promotional work. Neither of them have accomplished their dreams, and even their dreams of domestic bliss have barely manifested anything beyond more issues to worry about. This is aided by how Sajko writes her chapters, as each chapter is written in dense descriptions of the home or the thoughts and memories of the couple, making it easy to become trapped in their two-room apartment like the reader has become trapped in the Sartre-esque nightmare of this marriage.

However, the cynicism isn’t entirely all the novel has presented in this failing relationship. Sajko allows both the husband and the wife to have separate chapters, which at least shows their reasons for why they’ve turned out the way they are, as well as how there are some aspects of love that remain. One chapter follows the wife after the husband has stormed out of the apartment, where she flutters from resentment to petty acts of retribution to longing for him to return. The narration makes it clear this is a semi-regular occurrence for the couple, and while it can be toxic to some readers, it shows how hard it is for them both to truly cut off their relationship. Shoes can be dug out of the trash only to be put back in during the next fight, but the separation is too terrifying to truly commit to.

A lot of this also plays into the setting of the novel. Love Novel is not clear where and when this story takes place, although some scant details suggest it would take place sometime following the establishment of the European Union and when camera phones exist. However, Sajko’s tale carries a timeless quality due to how routine and common the issues in the marriage are presented. Money troubles add stress, political factors trickle down to the lower class, and the world will not stop turning despite how desperate some people are for a moment to breathe. Of course, these issues will persist, and they will begin to affect the next generation, as some of the few moments with the couple’s baby show how they will also begin to suffer from poverty and from attachment to the things they love.
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The true love story in this novel is the love between the reader and the characters, asking the reader to sympathize with the flawed, struggling characters and to empathize with how easy it is to fall into cynicism and to forget the joy in life. There are no easy solutions to making a marriage work when there are too many factors that will complicate it. However, Sajko’s novel can remind you that some relationships are too interwoven to be truly cut apart, and it’s in finding how they’re tied together that one will remember to persist regardless.

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​Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, VA. He is the author of Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has appeared in The Broadkill Review, Sage Cigarettes, Barrelhouse, Fifth Wheel Press, Cutbow Quarterly, and more. Visit carriganak.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @carriganak for more info.