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Nasmijati psa
(Making a Dog Laugh), 132 pp.,
AGM, Croatia 2006
Nasmijati psa is a collection of twenty-two
short stories of different genres that deal with seemingly ordinary
themes such as relationships between men and women, fringe groups,
growing up, love, sickness, ageing and death. Savičević
tells her stories with a casual precision, with sensitivity and
sometimes spite, often with surprising turns or poetic flourishes,
but she is always a master of observation. Ultimately there is
a lot more to these "ordinary" stories than meets the eye.
Olja
Savičević
's stories are alive with an impulse of irony, but
this anarchy is not abrasive, bitter and subversive but imaginative
and optimistic - by all means closer to hedonistic joie de vivre
than pessimistic fatalism. Vijenac
A
colourful and bold book by a daring, imaginative author. The boisterous
and unbridled style, vibrant with emotion, is topped off by many
a beautiful ending. You put her down, glowing, and think: Wow!
That's what you call literature.
Deutschlandfunk
The Croatian writer Olja
Savičević
enshrouds our
senses with her captivating short stories about breast cancer,
anorexia and enslavement. She does not deliberately evoke the
gravity of these issues, yet they creep into our consciousness.
Suddenly we lost in this mesmerising mist and cannot escape. Nor
do we want to. blond
The young Croatian writer
Olja Savičević
delves into human destinies and worlds with an easy style and
exuberant fantasy. Her stories are neither arbitrary nor bloodless,
and her passionate imagination makes each of them a unique experience.
arte
The slim collection Making
a Dog Laugh is the first book of prose by the Croatian newcomer
Olja Savičević,
and a real discovery. The author gives gentle poetic insights
into a country and a young generation that have been shell-shocked
by the war and take refuge in a world of dreams and altered states.
This is a masterful work - brief and compact, full of absurd events
encapsulated in keenly observed imagery. Mittelbayerische
Zeitung
Olja Savičević
portrays the generation that grew up in her home town of Split
after the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. She writes with enchanting ease,
yet shadows of the recent past are lurking between the lines.
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