Skins
Skins is an award-winning short story by Feridun Zaimoğlu . It was first printed in 2004 in the volume of stories Twelve grams of luck, along with other stories by the author. In 2003 she was awarded the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize by the jury.
content
A stranger comes into a village. The antique shop here sells contemporary documents from an archaic world, but the longer the man stays in it, the clearer it becomes to him that the village environment also has very lively archaic structures: the antiquarian's wife is ritually tattooed, there is the butcher, the saints, the stone breakers, virgins, and a special importance of a blood stain on a linen cloth.
The title hides refers to a variety of different hides and skins in the story.
meaning
Norbert Miller called the work “brilliantly told, rich in motifs. To do this, it needs what narrators have time and again: an unbroken relationship to their own narrative flow. This is convincing here. Wonderful details emerge. What it is not, neither an encrypted text that, via encryption, fetches from one world to the other. He is still experimental in the language. ”For Wolfgang Schneider, the text shows above all“ Fundamentalism not as a modern phenomenon, but as the result of premodern village stupidity ”. Daniela Strigl said that she felt “very irritated” by the archaic world portrayed in the story.
Zaimoğlu was invited to the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize with the story at the suggestion of Ursula März. There she won second place in the regular competition and the jury prize.