Summary
Ivana Bodrožić: Fiction
In the sixteen stories of Ivana Bodrožić, the landscape of women's everyday life opens up. Smells in the kitchen, the touch of a file in the living room, the quickening of steps during an evening walk, a look at the "master's cleavage", the teacher's laughter because the child in kindergarten said "my mom cleans", even though mom is a writer just like dad - every scene enters the text as proof that women's lives take place on the edges that literature usually skips. Even when it comes to love (with a Serb!), it is better to lock yourself in the house than to listen to the neighbors' comments: "Why did your man kill those people in Mladenovac?" ("Fortunately, I think, our Slavonian threw only four of his children from the balcony"). Ivana Bodrožić's fiction openly tells us that it is fiction, it does not convince us or offer comfort, instead of great fables, it hides small cuts of humiliation, accumulated frustration, fear that is always present and a voice that tries to be heard again and again. It is prose that is not read in breath, but in a break between daily duties, and reveals what many female readers feel, and rarely find written down: that the female experience carries both vulnerability and defiance, pressure and strength, pain and solidarity, and that perhaps literature is born there.
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