Body Kintsugi

By Senka Marić

Laced with a drive for life, sensuality and pleasure, Body Kintsugi is an intimate and optimistic book about a woman's relationship with her body as it breaks and is put back together.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 168

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PEN Translates Award Winner

Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with liquid gold, to highlight and celebrate an object's past. In this powerful and personal novella, Senka Maric uses the concept of kintsugi to interrogate ideas of illness, survival and recovery.

Two months after her husband packs his bags and leaves the family home, the narrator finds a lump in her armpit. It's a discovery she's been dreading ever since her mother's breast cancer diagnosis sixteen years earlier, and one that will change her body forever. Through diagnosis, chemotherapy, and surgery, the narrator returns to those moments of her girlhood when she learnt to be ashamed of her sexuality and estranged from her body - the same body that now threatens to fall apart during her illness. 

The story switches between two narrative streams: one returning to her memories of childhood and adolescence, and the other detailing her private struggle with her illness as a middle-aged woman. The result is an intimate and insightful account of Marić’s experience of womanhood through her body, including the difficulties of adolescence, ongoing patriarchal attitudes in Bosnian society, motherhood, and illness.