Some books can be read over time as you juggle their chapters with your life’s to-do list; others keep pulling you in with end-of-chapter cliffhangers, making items on your to-do list disappear. Others still are meant to be drunk, savoured and contemplated in one sitting, letting their stories, voices and observations slowly infuse your mind. Marija Peričić’s brilliant third novel, Foreign Country, is one of these.
It’s best to know as little as possible about the book, because there’s a masterful revelation late in it to take you by surprise if you’re not paying attention.
Having said this, the basic story (no spoilers ahead) involves two estranged sisters, one in rural Australia and the other now moved to Germany. They have not spoken to each other since a car accident many years ago that tore their relationship apart.
The sister in Australia, Elisabeta, after being shunned by the sister in Germany, Eva, for many years, mails her a plane ticket with a note simply saying “I need to see you. Please come”. Upon arrival in rural Victoria, Eva finds Elisabeta dead in her home. Eva’s first reaction is to think it’s suicide – to somehow pay penance for her part in the car accident for which Eva never forgave her. However, we slowly discover that memory is an unreliable note-taker, and many of Eva’s assumptions about her sister, and her own recollections, have been wrong.
Most of the book involves Eva going through her dead sister’s belongings and rediscovering her – her past, life, dreams and loves – and Eva needing to re-evaluate herself while doing so. The narrative progresses in pieces, resembling snapshots of memories, meshing past and present, reality and memory, technical tangibility and dreamlike existentialism. The story unfolds in a pastiche of detached, observational vignettes, punctuated by the occasional family photo, receipt or x-ray.
The title Foreign Country has multiple meanings, one being a metaphor that the past resembles an unknown place:
My memories are like thoughts belonging to someone else. The past is a country far away, a foreign place, that someone else travelled through and told me about, sent me a postcard. I don’t think I’ve ever been there, and I can’t ever really go there. I no longer know what belongs to me.
The other meaning involves Peričić’s characters, who are Croatian immigrants, arriving in Australia with little knowledge of their new home and all but no English. Stories of the nature of languages and cultural differences in new lands (not to mention her relationship with the Church) are peppered throughout her episodic anecdotes, each one written with a pen of detached retrospect, often questioning its own conclusions, directly or subtly.
The chapter describing the actual car crash briefly echoes Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller until branching off into its own narrative voice. This scene is exceptionally written, as if we are seeing the accident in slow motion; tension is replaced by a sense of sadness and helplessness since we know what is about to happen. It’s like a formal traffic accident report written by a poet.
Reading more like a reflective trance than a conventional story, Foreign Country is the best new Australian novel this reviewer has read in many moons. Its themes are universal, its observations and metaphors richly poetic without ever feeling forced and, despite its fundamentally morbid scenario, it emerges as a tale of redemption and forgiveness, albeit too late. It serves as a reminder of the unreliability of memory, and proposes that maybe, just maybe, our strongest memories, the very ones that shape our beliefs and worldviews, may just be the ones that are wrong.
Read: Book review: The Name of the Sister, Gail Jones
Foreign Country is loaded with topics, themes and literary devices that could fuel many a class discussion and essay, as well as cultural validity in contemporary Australia; I predict it will be in future English literature curricula.
Foreign Country, Marija Peričić
Publisher: Ultimo Press
ISBN: 9781761154218
Format: Paperback
Pages: 272pp
RRP: $34.99
Publication date: June 2025
Foreign Country will be launched in Readings Melbourne on 13 June.
