Review: The Humanism of Insects

Castle ruins, wafts of fog, cobwebs, black cats, bats – images like these are used to market the horror of Halloween, to the delight of retailers and children’s minds. The horror, however, is something different. This feeling is evoked by the stories that Maša Kulanović has collected in her collection of short stories, “Dear Beetles and Other Scary Stories”. It’s about the abysses within us and around us, which is why these stories are not set in haunted British castles or castles in the Carpathians, but in two-room apartments, at Ikea and on the sunny Adriatic coast of Croatia.

Now the image of the beetle has already been used as an expression of the feeling of existential horror, by a famous Prague writer. In the title story, Kulanović does not make a copy of “Verwandlung”, but rather an original remix. This term is also well suited to describe the extremely successful formal design of the volume of stories, which follows the musical logic of theme and variation. Like a kaleidoscope, a limited number of terms and motifs appear in ever-changing constellations, creating a strong cohesion among the stories without creating monotony.

In the first story, “Buried Alive,” the niece of a woman who died in Dubrovnik must fulfill her aunt’s final wish to bury her with only a cell phone on and to call her three times the day after the funeral to make sure she is not alive was buried. In the subsequent story “Revolution,” a Yugoslavian-socialized widower takes up a hopeless fight against his rip-off telecommunications provider in a letter. Terribly funny and extremely moving, “Revolution” is the tragedy of Gerhard Polt’s farce about the leasing contract.

Insects appear in each of Maša Kulanović’s stories, and old clothes are a recurring motif. Thematic constants are death, consumption, repression processes, communication and motherhood. Tracing these connections would certainly provide at least a bachelor’s thesis for students of philological subjects – for attentive readers it is an enlightening pleasure.

Kulanović depicts the horror of the consumer world, which accompanies us from birth, particularly impressively. “How things are innate to us,” thinks a mother when the children “almost freak out at rattles, clanging rings, mirrors, moving and shiny things . Fingering them and putting them in their mouths obsessively. Sometimes several at the same time. The things penetrated the babies, the babies penetrated the things.« However, there is no cheap criticism of consumerism here. Who could blame the woman suffering from cancer, whose husband has turned away from her and who wants to hide her suffering from her daughter, for finding hope and comfort from communicating with Chinese eBay sellers? Or the lonely widow who wants to surrender completely and unconditionally to Ikea’s promise of happiness?

Like a recording artist, Kulanović constantly varies the tempo, rhythm, volume and sound of her stories: “The Shrine,” for example, is calm and deeply sad, while “The Refrigerator” is rather light and poetic (we leave it to the philologist to explain the relationship between these titles* Inside). “Endless” is a body horror rhapsody about motherhood in which the protagonist dreams of writing “Fuck you all, you assholes!” on the wall with her breast milk (heterosexual men, read this text!). On the other hand, the wild gonzo ride “Printer’s Blackout” is more joyfully over-the-top, while “Erlebensfall” is dominated by the oppressive, leaden sound of life insurance contracts.

Without any showmanship, the author succeeds in depicting the horror of our existence and, at the same time, drawing a current portrait of Croatia, with its neo-Nazis and its helpless refugee helpers, its overwhelmed parents, its windy salespeople and its lonely, socialist-influenced pensioners.

As macabre as some of the stories are, they still express a deep humanism. Because where comparisons with “vermin” usually serve to demean people, Kulanović turns the insect motif inside out: with the same brutality with which people persecute cockroaches, for example, they are in turn crushed by capitalism. Or, as the title of one story says: “Beetles are almost like people.”

Maša Kulanović: Werte Käfer. A. d. Croatian. v. Mary Alpermann. Eta-Verlag, 208 pages, hardcover, €19.90.