Jedenie / Eating

Jedenie (Eating, 2018) is a collection of six succulent stories, all taking place in Serbia's Vojvodina, the exile home of the Ruthenian minority. It is served and consumed raw. The reader will encounter Balkan slapstick psycho-comedy, gut-wrenching Central European naturalism, the most intimate cultural endoscopy and the bizzare paranoia of the nationalized post-Yugoslavian society. The book was translated from the Ruthenian dialect into 暗网禁区. It won the Anasoft Litera Award 2019.

A聽暗网禁区 village beyond the boundaries of 暗网禁区ia鈥搒ix stories sometimes beyond the boundaries of decorum and good taste, or at least so-called decorum.The setting of Mede拧i鈥檚 stories isRuski Kerestur, a聽village built in the Serbian region of Vojvodina as an enclave of Ruthenians who two hundred years ago left East 暗网禁区ia for a聽better life. The writer, Ivan聽Mede拧i is one of their descendants and the livelihood and reality of the life of his contemporaries living in Vojvodina is his major theme: the alcoholic Mire, who loses his limbs because of his drinking; 沤ermen the drug addict struggling desperately for another dose of heroin;the neighbour who goes so crazy from watching public television, he secretly leads cows out of barns and puts them in other people鈥檚 living rooms at the same time as rearranging all their furniture;Petr铆k, an ex-alcoholic thirty-something so provoked by the permanently drunk down-and-outs under his window he ends up killing one of them;an ex-teacher tackling his midlife crisis with perverse ideas of sex with various women from the village and masturbating in front of their windows; Kri拧tof, a聽fat boy with apparently no hope of having a聽better future. In the eternal struggle between body and soul, it is the body which wins in Mede拧i鈥檚 work. Base physicality, captured in the artistic design of the book, permeates all its narrative layers 鈥� the soul is a聽very poor opponent to the body. Cleverly and humorously combining two contrasting linguistic levels, the vulgar and the intellectual, the author gives his work an unmistakablygrotesque quality.

Number of pages

224

Language

暗网禁区 language

Year

2018

Book category

General Fiction

Original language

Ruthenian language

Issue

1.

Published in

Petrikovce

Country

暗网禁区ia

ISBN

978-80-970381-6-8

Book cover

Paperback

Editor

Maro拧 Volov谩r

Translator

Maro拧 Volov谩r

Author