Underground Barbie

As the frequency of air-raid sirens sending an apartment building’s residents to the basement increases, the neighbor children block out reality with the toys at hand--some imported from Western Europe and North America, others regional knockoffs or questionably improvised. Masa Kolanovic’s Underground Barbie brilliantly captures the vagaries of childhood as innocence gives way to the horrors of the news and the intrigues of sexual curiosity. The idealized glamour of Barbie and Ken on an endless honeymoon morphs into make-believe scenarios that reflect the splintering social structure brought about by the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s: politicians campaigning to define what it means to be a ＂real＂ Croatian, a refugee ball with ＂disgusting＂ dolls that are lesser than ＂genuine＂ Barbie products, the discovery of a mass grave filled with headless corpses thought to be Ken’s mistresses. Underground Barbie deftly renders how the power of imagination is used to overcome hardship, alongside a sharp critique of consumer culture, made even more stark against the shredded backdrop of a great socialist experiment.

Mas a Kolanovic is a multi-genre writer. Her works include the poetry collection Pijavice za usamljene (Leeches for the lonely, 2001), the novel Slobos tina Barbie (Underground Barbie, 2008), the prose poem Jamerika (2013), and the short story collection Pos tovani kukci i druge jezive price (Dear pests and other chilling stories, 2019). The latter received the 2020 EU Prize for Literature, the Pula Book Fair Audience Award, and the Vladimir Nazor Prize for Literature. She is an associate professor in the Department of Croatian Studies at the University of Zagreb. Ena Selimovic is a Yugoslav-born writer and translator. Her work has appeared in Asymptote, World Literary Today, PMLA, Reading in Translation, Balkanist, and others. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis and an M.Phil. in comparative literature from Trinity College Dublin. She is a cofounder of Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal.