Fiction
Balerina, balerina/Ballerina, Ballerina
by Marko Sosič
Description
Ballerina is fifteen years old. She lives with her mother, father, and brother in a small village. She loves watching the chestnut tree in their backyard because of the birds sleeping in its branches. She is fond of singing and is happy when her friend Ivan visits. But sometimes she breaks plates and glasses. And every morning she wets the bed. Ballerina is different from her peers.
The short novel Ballerina, Ballerina is set in the 1960s, a period of great leaps and advances for humanity. But to Ballerina, who earned her nickname from a tendency to stand on tiptoes when distressed, the relationships between those closest to her, the light of the day and the dark of the night, the changing of seasons and her dreams are far more important than the news that the first person walked on the moon or that the war in Vietnam had begun. Although her view of the world can seem narrow, it may be that, perhaps precisely because of that, it is much more attuned to what really matters in life.
Drawing comparison to William Faulkner in its expressionistic depiction of Ballerina’s interior world, this is a classic of contemporary Slovenian literature: a hugely popular exploration of a character whose world is so divorced from what we think of as reality.
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Rights sold
Croatia (DHK)
France (Les Editions
franco-slovènes & Cie)
Russia (Lingvistika)
Serbia (Arhipelag)
USA (Dalkey Archive Press)
Reviews
The book’s emotional strength comes not from conventional plotting, but rather from the gulf between Ballerina’s dispassionate narration and our own understanding of her predicament. … [Sosič] is masterful in achieving his apparent aim: placing the reader within a totally different consciousness
– Publishers Weekly
You read this novel in one go, not because it is so short, but because the author develops the highest degree of empathy for the main character, something that is in reality the most that can be expected from literature. – Novi list
The narration in Ballerina, Ballerina is tight, and that only adds to its expressiveness. – Radio Slovenia
Ballerina, Ballerina is a painful and poetic reconstruction of its narrator’s fractured worldview... in both the details of her family life and the bits of the mass-media reality that flow beyond the boundaries of her backyard... [she] is unreliable, disoriented, atemporal. – Vladislava Gordić Petković, Serbian literary critic
Author Biography
Marko Sosič (1958) is a theatre and film director as well as novelist and short story writer, born in Trieste, Italy, where he continues to live. He has worked for various Slovenian and Italian theatres and television and started publishing fiction in the late 1980s. So far he has written five novels and two short story collections. His work has been honoured with a string of literary and theatre awards, and he has been translated into several languages.
Beletrina Academic Press
Beletrina Academic Press, established 1996, is a leading Slovenian literary publisher that has gained its reputation by introducing prominent works of classic and contemporary world and national fiction and non-fiction to Slovenian readers. Beletrina currently represents over 20 of the best Slovenian authors, from the great classics to the biggest contemporary names and the most promising up and coming authors.
View all titlesBibliographic Information
- Publisher Beletrina Academic Press
- Orginal LanguageSlovenian
- ISBN/Identifier 9789612843373
- Publication Country or regionSlovenia
- Pages132
- ReadershipGeneral
- Publish StatusPublished
- Copyright Year1997
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