SOUNDTRACK: hiatus
[READ: March 16, 2022] In the Jaws of Life
The version pictured here is not the one I read–there’s no pictures of it online! My copy was translated by Celia Hawkesworth and Michael Henry Heim.
This book is a collection of short stories from throughout Ugrešić’s career.
The book has three (or 8) stories in it. I discovered Ugrešić through The 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar (story #2). “Lend Me Your Character” was weird and cool and was probably my favorite story in the collection (it’s here as well).
When I read a little about Ugrešić, I found that she was born in Croatia, but left the region when the war in Yugolslavia broke out, saying she was post-national and refusing to acknowledge her Croatian heritage. She currently resides in Amsterdam.
Her stories are wonderful mash ups of fairy tales, feminist theory, “traditional women’s writing” and a lot of sexuality.
“Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life (a patchwork novel)” (1981) [trans C.H.]
This story has so much going on that it’s easy to overlook that it’s a fairly straightforward story, just with a lot of filigree tacked on. The story opens with a “Key to the Various Symbols” and includes things like — dotted lines with scissors (cut the text along the line as desired); slashes (pleats: make large thematic stitches on either side of the author’s seam); four equals signs (make a metatextual knot and draw in as desired). And so on. And the contents is actually listed as “The Paper Pattern” which lays out each section according to a sewing pattern. Each section heading is given a parenthetical comment (tacking, padding, hemming, interfacing).
When you start the story you see that the symbols are indeed throughout the story, although honestly after a few pages I gave up trying to figure out what they might mean.
The story starts with the narrator saying that her friends told her to write “a women’s story.” The author looks at several lonely hearts letters in the paper and picks the fifth one as the basis. Steffie, aged 25, is a typist by profession. She’s lonely and sad and lives with her aunt. (more…)
