Bőr

The first collection of stories by the young Slovenian writer Andrej Blatnik to appear in English, Skinswaps represents a new ethos in the literature of post-communist Eastern Europe.Unconcerned with the ponderous legacy of communism and the explicit struggle between the personal and the political, Blatnik's stories utilize a range of narrative perspectives from the dramatically oblique, the formally experimental, and the comically absurd to the poignantly realistic to cast unexpected light on universal conflicts of identity and fate. Blatnik's detached and impersonal yet eerily compelling authorial voice, his laconic prose style, as well as unforeseen shifts in subject, tone, setting, and length, and the unfailing ability to tell a good story enable him to explore difficult themes with offbeat humor, subtlety, and precision.

In "The Taste of Blood", a lonely young woman, hauntedly by memories of her childhood, wanders upon a group of men watching the naked body of a dead woman who has just been pulled from a river. The occurrence leads to an increasingly cryptic and threatening encounter with the two police officers who are handling the case. In "Kyoto", an American tea-drinking school in Japan is the setting for an absurd and very funny bet, which has surprising philosophical implications. And in "Isaac", the chillingly abrupt narrative mirrors a boy's tragic attempt to escape from the horror of a boxcar on its way to a concentration camp.

In these stories and in the thirteen others in the volume, Blatnik's vision of the isolation, self-deception, violence, and emotional deterioration of human experience, though powerfully rendered, is tempered by a light fictional touch and ahumane sense of humor and irony.