Marica Bodrožić:
Short stories
Der Bund wrote the following about Marica Bodrožić’s “unusually strong first novel”: “The scent of olivewood, the taste of wine and oil, the blue, grey and green of the festive church: It all contributes to the flair of the narrative flow, like the language – with a unique lyricism that repeatedly recalls Rilke.” Der Spieler der inneren Stunde.
In these new stories, the subjects of sensually tangible life are transposed into the magical world of images. The Mediterranean, village life, the seasons, childhood as a Garden of Eden, the laws of dreams, as well as war and dictatorship, all fill the inner narrative world of the imagination.
The author researched for the book as a fellow of Robert Bosch Stiftung in the city archives of Zagreb, Split and Zadar, and on individual islands. Her magical, yet realistic pieces were partly produced before her journey and assumed their present form in a long wiring process that lasted three years, as the echoes of her island meetings and on-site experiences filtered through from a distance that she finds important.
The stories repeatedly underwent metamorphoses and detached themselves to a great extent from their realistic settings, but are nevertheless enriched by the results of her research, which also provides the backbone of her poetic, linguistic journey inside real and conceived images. The author handles political and historical reality in a unique way. At times she uses poetic elevation, with linguistic collage techniques, lyrical deformation and alienation (as in the story “Die Meeresseite der Orange”), to present the individual story, island or biography of a specific political era as a generally relevant event that could have happened anywhere else in the world and is only presented here in the specific historical patina of its narrative world.
With an incorruptibly poetic perspective, the author has produced displaced pieces of reality on the eleven Dalmatian and Istrian islands she visited, before allowing them to discharge into modern tales, imbued with light and colors. Her characters are image inspectors, wind collectors, or dictionary conquerors, wanderers through the countryside, mythology and history. The story “Die Rache des Dammhirsches” for example refers to a meeting between Tito and Walter Ulbricht. It unfolds on the Brioni Islands, where Marica Bodrožić also researched. Here, Tito had his summer residence, as commemorated by a seemingly anachronistic museum today. The story “Der Bote des Cerebellums” is also set on these isles, where Robert Koch once carried out his scientific research and eventually discovered a treatment for malaria. “Die Meeresseite der Orange” focuses on the Yugoslav gulag on Goli Otok.
Dream and reality are merged in Marica Bodrožić’s stories, images appear of souls and worlds that are both beautiful and shocking. Yet we can rely on the healing power of her poetry: “In winter, when thoughts lie covered in sulfur, something in people’s phrases is released and the empty world on the inside is ploughed over.”
Der Windsammler. Short stories. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007
183 pages, hardback, 16.80 Euro, ISBN 978-3-518-41914-4
Published: October 2007
About the Author: The 2011 Liechtenstein P.E.N. Club’s Literature Prize has been awarded to the Berlin author Marica Bodrožić. Literary critic Widmar Puhl announced on behalf of the P.E.N. Club that the prize, with a total value of more than 12,000 euros, was awarded on March 26, 2011, in Vaduz. The writer, who was born in Dalmatia (now Croatia) in 1973, currently works as a freelance author in Berlin and writes poems, novels, stories, and essays.