Photo: dpa/Hendrik Schmidt
How are you? – Must. We know this moribund dialogue. Barbi Marković says: “The world is not right, bad things happen, people are overwhelmed and don’t count on the future.” In her book “Minihorror” she tells short stories about Mini and Miki in a casual, almost children’s book-like tone, whose names are reminiscent of Walt Disney’s famous couple, but who “late in capitalism” (as one story is called) experience threatening things that are as depressing as they are funny: relatives model their bodies out of cake dough, worms crawl out of chocolate, and so on The Ikea kitchen top that was ordered was not produced, but the fitters who were also ordered absolutely have to install something that doesn’t exist. At parties there is “zombie talk” because no one “knows the same TV series, no one listens to the same music, no one has played the same computer game.”
“Mini horror” would be a topic that everyone could now talk about. For this, Barbi Marković received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize for fiction. According to the jury, Marković reveals “the uncanny nature of every situation, no matter how harmless, the horror of everyday life, the horror of one’s own family.” Once Mini calls out “Guat, guat, guat, guat”: she is practicing speaking like Miki’s family, who live in the Austrian provinces. Mini comes from a suburb of Belgrade. If anyone asks her where she’s from, she’s apt to throw punches.
Marković was born in Belgrade in 1980 and has lived in Vienna since 2006. She writes in Serbian and German. In her penultimate novel “The Shitty Time” (2021), she sent three young people in a time machine to the morbid Milošević years. At some point someone always shouts: “Good, good, good, good.”
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