Foreign Country (Marija Peričić, Ultimo)

In Marija Peričić’s lyrical and haunting third novel, the foreign country is the site of dislocation and alienation wrought by migration, grief and trauma. Croatian-Australian nurse Eva, who resides in Berlin with her partner Peter, unexpectedly receives a return flight to Melbourne – booked by her estranged older sister, Elizabeta. When Eva reluctantly makes her way to the isolated ruins where El has been living, she finds her sister has died and learns she has been named executor of El’s estate. As Eva sets about clearing the detritus of El’s life, Foreign Country unspools into an excavation of their childhood and the incident that cleaved their relationship in two. Peričić deftly situates Eva’s personal experience of grief within the displacement of migration: ‘The past is a country far away, a foreign place, that someone else travelled through and told me about, sent me a postcard’. Boarding passes, newspaper clippings, hospital case notes, CT scans and photos are entombed within the pages of Foreign Country, countering the messy, ill-formed swirl of human emotions, resentments, and fallible memories with cold, hard facts. All the documents are fictional, except for several photos of Peričić’s own family, which imbue the book with an inescapable sense of melancholy and verisimilitude. As Eva becomes increasingly subsumed by El’s house, her last living connection to a sister she scarcely understood, a dialogue between the two that wasn’t possible in life begins to open up. Vivid and alive with narrative richness and catharsis, Foreign Country will appeal to readers of Melanie Cheng, Laura McPhee-Browne and Kavita Bedford.

Books+Publishing reviewer: Sonia Nair is a Melbourne-based writer and critic. Books+Publishing is Australia’s number-one source of pre-publication book reviews.

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