Kolanović, Maša; Fridrich, Patricia (Übers.) - Underground

Prospero Verlag, Broschur, 212 Seiten

Sloboština ist eine Hochhaussiedlung an der Peripherie von Zagreb. Masa Kolanovićs Protagonistin wächst dort in den achtziger Jahren auf, und wie viele Mädchen auf der ganzen Welt verbringt sie mit ihren Freundinnen etliche Stunden des Tages in der glamourösen Scheinwelt ihrer Barbiepuppen. Anfang der neunziger Jahre drängt sich die politische Realität, der Krieg und Zerfall Jugoslawiens, in die unbeschwerte Kindheit. Bei Luftalarm bringen sich die Bewohner im Hochhauskeller in Sicherheit. Barbies Welt entsteht nun zwischen Einmachgläsern und Rattenfallen, eine ramponierte Ken-Figur vom Flohmarkt wird zum nationalistischen Anführer befördert.

The voice of the new generation in this narrative space is represented by the novel Slobostina Barbie (Barbie's privileges, 2008) by Masa Kolanovic, a writer who has grown up alongside the "coming of age" of the new transitional state. Kolanovic (b.1979) gives a voice to the generation that grew up during the destruction of socialist models of identity and that must reconstruct for itself the cultural memory destroyed in the 1990s. Slobostina Barbie is a novel about growing up, set during the war, written from the perspective of a little girl living in a tower block in New Zagreb, whose greatest problem, as she sees it, is how to protect her collection of Barbie dolls from the violence. Kolanovic is an ironic but warm storyteller; her narrator is preoccupied with observing the many changes that accumulate in her child's head in a critical but humorous way. In addition to being an excellent writer, Kolanovic is also an excellent illustrator, and her novel is adorned with her own drawings, again childish but also ironic.

Literary critics with a preference for popular culture have found in this novel plenty of material for cultural analysis, from the social and political context to the formation of the young girl's identity. Slobostina Barbie is a novel that entices readers, even if its appeal is the pre-modern emotional identification of reader and hero, or more precisely of woman reader and heroine. Here, the women's right to a public is realized as the right to literature of quality, which is not diminished by the fact of its being entertaining. This female urban prose deliberately rejects the informative or didactic mode, yet it strengthens processes of self-knowledge and self-affirmation in its women readers.

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-03-31-zlatar-en.html
Andrea Zlatar
Literary perspectives: Croatia
Post-traumatic stress disorder