“Ballerina, Ballerina is a painful and poetic reconstruction of its narrators fractured worldview … in both the details of her family life and the bits of the mass-media reality that flow beyond the boundaries of her backyard … [she] is unreliable, disoriented, atemporal.” — Vladislava Gordić Petković
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The narrator of this novel is Ballerina, a fifteen-year-old with the cognitive faculties of a child, and each of its fifteen chapters begins with her first wetting her bed and thereby greeting a new day. Drawing comparison to William Faulkner in its expressionistic depiction of Ballerina’s interior world, this is a classic of contemporary Slovenian literature: a hugely popular exploration of a character whose world is so divorced from what we think of as reality.
Marko Sosič was born in Trieste in 1958. He has directed at various Slovenian and Italian theaters, as well as for television and radio. He started publishing fiction in the late ’80s, and is the author of several books, including a collection of short stories and an autobiographical novel about his time in the theater. Ballerina, Ballerina, his first novel, received the Vstajenje Award, and also earned him the first Citta’ di Salò Prize in 2005. In 2007, the Slovenian Pen Club nominated the novel for the international Strega Europeo Award, and it has been selected for inclusion in the “100 Slavic Novels” project.