Jedenie / Eating

Jedenie (Eating, 2018) is a collection of six succulent stories, all taking place in Serbia's Vojvodina, the exile home of the Ruthenian minority. It is served and consumed raw. The reader will encounter Balkan slapstick psycho-comedy, gut-wrenching Central European naturalism, the most intimate cultural endoscopy and the bizzare paranoia of the nationalized post-Yugoslavian society. The book was translated from the Ruthenian dialect into Slovak. It won the Anasoft Litera Award 2019.

A Slovak village beyond the boundaries of Slovakia–six stories sometimes beyond the boundaries of decorum and good taste, or at least so-called decorum.The setting of Medeši’s stories isRuski Kerestur, a village built in the Serbian region of Vojvodina as an enclave of Ruthenians who two hundred years ago left East Slovakia for a better life. The writer, Ivan Medeši is one of their descendants and the livelihood and reality of the life of his contemporaries living in Vojvodina is his major theme: the alcoholic Mire, who loses his limbs because of his drinking; Žermen the drug addict struggling desperately for another dose of heroin;the neighbour who goes so crazy from watching public television, he secretly leads cows out of barns and puts them in other people’s living rooms at the same time as rearranging all their furniture;Petrík, an ex-alcoholic thirty-something so provoked by the permanently drunk down-and-outs under his window he ends up killing one of them;an ex-teacher tackling his midlife crisis with perverse ideas of sex with various women from the village and masturbating in front of their windows; Krištof, a fat boy with apparently no hope of having a better future. In the eternal struggle between body and soul, it is the body which wins in Medeši’s work. Base physicality, captured in the artistic design of the book, permeates all its narrative layers – the soul is a very poor opponent to the body. Cleverly and humorously combining two contrasting linguistic levels, the vulgar and the intellectual, the author gives his work an unmistakablygrotesque quality.

Number of pages

224

Language

Slovak language

Year

2018

Book category

General Fiction

Original language

Ruthenian language

Issue

1.

Published in

Petrikovce

Country

Slovakia

ISBN

978-80-970381-6-8

Book cover

Paperback

Editor

Maroš Volovár

Translator

Maroš Volovár

Author