Ballerina, Ballerina

Balerina, balerina
Slovenia
Marko-Sosič-Foto-Agnese-Divo-150x150
Marko Sosič
I don’t know what Yugoslavia is. I don’t know who Yugoslavia is. It has never been in our kitchen.

The novel Ballerina, Ballerina is a first person narrative of a girl, later on a woman whose soul has been wounded. Her understanding of the world is limited, moreover she relives it through the eyes and words of adults. Foremostly, through the eyes of her mother Ivanka, her brother Karl, her friend Ivan who used to believe that he would become a doctor and cure her, all the way to a village postman and a series of other characters who at the end of the 1960s at the Carst of Trieste come close to her frail being. Balerina does not distinguish dreams from reality, both dimmensions melt into a uniform whole presenting her truth of the life and world. A part of narration is in a form of epistolar novel, while the entire novel could be read as pastiche, referring to models from 18th and 19th century.

Marko Sosič  (1958-2021) was a writer and a director with a degree in directing from the Academy for Theatre and Film Arts in Zagreb. He has directed in various Slovenian and Italian theatres as well as for television.

He published the collection of novellas Rosa na steklu (Dew on the Glass), the autobiographical theatre chronicle Tisoč dni, dvesto noči (A Thousand Days, Two Hundred Nights), and the short novel Balerina, balerina (1997), which won the Trieste Vstajenje and Umberta Saba awards as well as the first prize of the Città di Salò, while ranking among the finalists for the Kresnik Award for the best Slovenian novel of the year. It was likewise nominated for the Premio Strega International. His three subsequent novels Tito, amor mijo, Ki od daleč prihajaš v mojo bližino (You who Come from Far Away into my Vicinity) and Kratki roman o snegu in ljubezni (A Short Novel on Love and Snow) were also shortlisted for the Kresnik Award.