HOLOGRAMS OF FEAR

From Croatian journalist Drakuli (How We Survived Communism, 1991—not reviewed), her first novel to be translated into English. Here, illness, its sensation and its isolation, is the theme—about a diabetic Croatian woman who's living in New York more or less alone (her daughter's been left back in Europe), waiting for a call to Boston and the summons to a kidney transplant that will perhaps save her life. As the book begins, this call has come, and what follows is a nearly moment-by-moment account of the sensation of dread, physical discomfort, mental dissociation, and spiritual need that the malfunctioning body imposes on a person: ``I must weave circles around myself and maybe that way I can enclose time. Little ones to begin and then larger. Time passes through me. I feel it making me heavy. But I can't hold on to it. I am not in it. There is no Me.'' Phenomenologically accurate as all this is, be warned that it makes for sludgy fiction: claustrophobic, repetitious, and thoroughly dispiriting.