Damages
Bazhé
(Sr. Associate Reviewer - Dr. Alma Bond)
2002 Writer's Showcase
ISBN: 0595237649 Amazon's price is: $21.95
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About one man's fight to overcome the psychological wounds created by his peculiar upbringing, as he struggled to find his true identity & freedom.
In addition, it expresses his unconditional love for his mother. The story begins with the death of his abusive father, a Communist official. His mother is diagnosed with cancer, and he immediately returns to Macedonia to take care of her.
Meanwhile, his more that thirty-year search for his biological mother ends, & he tells her his life story, starting with his lonely childhood & adolescence.
After finding his “new mother” to be very understanding, he reveals his first gay experience in the army, his desire for self-realization that caused scandals in the College of National Security, his escape to Turkey where he transformed into a stunning transvestite after meeting a handsome wealthy man, & his return to Yugoslavia where he wandered in the underground world of a country that was falling apart. As Yugoslav nationalism & Islamic fundamentalism rose, he experienced them directly, almost losing his life, but he eventually discovers that it is his adoptive mother's devotion that is irreplaceable.
Sr. Associate Reviewer Dr. Alma Bond writes:
The author of Damages is an interesting writer. On the one hand, he does not write particularly well & makes many errors, probably because English is not his native language. The book is badly edited, if edited at all. On the other hand, it held my interest until the last quarter. Bazhé is obviously very talented, but needs a great deal of work to develop into a polished writer.
The first part of Damages tells the story of his lonely childhood, his abusive father, & his overprotective mother. It is a saga of the sad results of living with lies, about his adoption, his sexual preferences, & his mother's terminal illness.
A child adopted at six months of age, he becomes obsessed by the desire to find his biological parents in order to find out his true identity. Using a clever structural device, when he finally finds his birth mother, he tells her the story of his life.
His birth mother is very accepting of who he is, including his sexual preferences, & cries continuously during his review of his life. She feels terribly guilty about having given him out for adoption when she was only sixteen years old, & tries to worm her way into her son's good graces. But Bazhé never does forgive her. He remains suspicious of her to the end, even though she seemed to this reviewer, at least, to be genuinely caring of her long-lost son. The writer needs to show not tell us why he was suspicious of her, as she is absolutely accepting & understanding throughout the telling of his life story. It is likely that he wouldn't let himself believe in her because he was afraid it would dilute his love for the woman he knew as his mother.
The tale of Bazhé & the mother who raised him is truly a love story. When she develops cancer, he becomes the child we all would wish to have, under such circumstances. He returns to Macedonia from the United States to care for her. He tenderly bathes her, feeds her, becoming expert at the disgusting job of cleaning up & changing her colostomy bag. He cherishes her, as she does her astonishingly handsome son, whom she calls “my gold.” Both feel free to express affection physically & to speak of their loving feelings for each other, as few parents & offspring do.
The search for his biological mother, their attempt to know each other after thirty years of being apart, his loving care of his mother & her gradual decline into death, are all very moving & make for absorbing reading. It is the last third of the book, where he tells about his unfortunate homosexual experiences & as a transvestite, that the book (at least to this reader) seemed endless. I think it would be greatly improved by cutting one hundred pages.
The writing is a bit clumsy & over-wordy. Remarks such as “I would fall sleep” (p. 172) & “...one of those types of men who didn't use to rejections”(p. 272) interrupt the reader's train of thought. He sometimes uses words incorrectly, as when he calls his half-brothers step-brothers. iUniverse, Bazhé's publisher, does not do any editing, which the writer desperately needs.
Damages is enlightening as a history of the troubled Balkans & the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. It is an interesting book, despite its considerable shortcomings, written by a bright young author with a gift for story telling, who in all likelihood will improve as he matures.
More from Bazhé: Art exhibits:
2002 The Lowe Gallery at Hudson Guild, New York, N.Y. (Group Exhibition)
1993 National Highlights ‘93. Limner Gallery, New York City. (Group Exhibition)
1988 National Art Gallery, Skopje, Macedonia. (Group Exhibition)
(02/23/03)
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