Srđan Srdić

Srđan Srdić in Belgrade, August 2013

Srđan Srdić (born November 3, 1977 in Kikinda , Yugoslavia ) is a Serbian writer , short story writer, editor and he teaches creative writing . He has published two novels and two collections of short stories and is represented as an author or editor in numerous literary magazines and short story collections.

Training and social engagement

After graduating from high school, Srdić studied literature at the Philological Faculty of Belgrade University .

Srđan Srdić is a signatory of the declaration published in 2017 on the common language of Croats , Serbs , Bosniaks and Montenegrins .

Works

In 2007, during his time as a high school teacher, Srdić won first prize in the Ulaznica short story competition. In 2009 he received the Laza Lazarević Prize , which honors outstanding short stories. The following year he received the Borislav Pekić Prize for Literature. Pekić is one of the authors with an important influence on Srdić's work. For several years in a row he was the editor and program director of the Kikinda Short International Short Story Festival.

His novels and stories have not yet been translated into German.

Dead field

In 2010 Srdić published his first novel Totes Feld ( Mrtvo polje ), a road horror. This work received numerous positive reviews and was shortlisted for several Serbian literary prizes (NIN, Vital, Borisav Stanković ) as well as for the international Meša Selimović award . The novel was largely praised for its language; H. for the successful stylistic and formal solution to deal with the topic, in the simultaneous use of modern and postmodern techniques, as well as for the constant change of perspective and register . Set in the warlike year 1993 in Serbia , the novel follows several narrative threads, once Pablo and Paolo on their journey from Belgrade to Kikinda , avoiding military service, one because of the peculiarity of the ubiquitous ideologies of violence around them, and the other following it aimlessly , then Stela, who makes the same journey, only in the opposite direction, and the quasi- psychopathic captain who makes the reader feel the influence of Cormac McCarthy . Like all of Srdić's works, this novel draws much from its intertextuality . The novel also contains a discographic and a videographic part.

Espirando

Espirando: Chants to Death (Serbian Pesme na smrt ) consists of nine short stories, all of which deal with the subject of death. The collection was published in 2011, for which he received the Serbian Biljana Jovanović and the international Edo Budiša Prize. In addition, numerous very positive reviews followed, praising the elliptical character as well as the diversity of the formal linguistic approaches, especially the different narrative voices, which range from the conventional first person to the broad polyphony , and the linguistic reflection of the characters: in the limit states of grief, violence, illness, sexual desire, suicide, the frightening banality . The collection contains numerous intertextual references, and arguably the most notable influence is that of Samuel Beckett in the characters. But you can find a pastiche by William Faulkner in A Rose for Emily , as well as quotations from Perry Farrell . The stories Zozobra and Medicine take their names from the song Old Man Gloom and the Jesus song, respectively . References can also be made to Thomas Mann , Henri Michaux , Michel Houellebecq . All of the stories were previously published in literary magazines in Serbia and Croatia. The Ukrainian translation of the collection was published in 2013. The English translation of the story Gray, Dark Something (Serbian Sivo, sumorno nešto ) was published in The Ofi Press Magazine , and Mosquitos (Serbian Komarci ) was translated into Albanscihe and featured in the anthology From Belgrade, with love (Albanian: Nga Beogradi , me dashuri ; Serbian: Iz Beograda s ljubavlju ) published. Srdić's stories have also been translated into Romanian , Hungarian and Polish.

Satori

Srdić's second novel Satori was published in 2013 by the KrR publishing house (for Rašić's Literary Workshop). The narrator, called the driver, goes outside the city and his social roles, remembers and meets new people on the fringes of society, and thus offers a digressive and incoherent narrative that is characterized by a certain solipsistic horror that is expressed in the language of the Characters expresses. "Not a novel that is about anything, but one that is about nothing", which deals with banality and the fear of freedom or freedom, with a particular focus on the narrator's connection with the military, even alluding to the consequences of war crimes (" PTSD even if no immediate war participants"). The novel contains a one-page quote from " Oblomov ", " The Education of Emotions " an interview with Toby Driver from Kayo Dot . "The Dead Flag Blues" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor and the cartoon series "Stripy" are significant quotes in the middle of the text. Since this novel shows features of the educational novel but also of the road novel, the author himself describes it as a kind of anti-educational novel, with a protagonist who learns nothing and gets nowhere. Satori was praised for showing progress in Srdić's work; above all, he lacked a certain ironic distance in the previous work, and the fact that this was now offered opened up a new way of reading the text of through the inserted quotations Satori, but also the cited works themselves. The same reviewer positions Satori in a posterity of the post-structuralists who also cited the work, Roland Barthes and Jean-François Lyotard , as well as the post-rock band Mogwai . Another, more polemical, criticism noted the literary achievement and importance, but at the same time showed some reservations about the intentional randomness and insignificance.

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ "Espirando" ( Memento of the original from October 29, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , stubovi.co.rs @1@ 2

↑ "Intervju: Srđan Srdić" , ziher.hr

↑ Derk, Denis: Declaration on the common language of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins is adopted . In: Večernji list . March 28, 2017, ISSN 0350-5006 , p. 6–7 ( vecernji.hr [accessed on May 9, 2019] Serbo-Croatian: Donosi se Deklaracija o zajedničkom jeziku Hrvata, Srba, Bošnjaka i Crnogoraca .). (Archived on WebCite ( Memento from May 23, 2017 on WebCite ))

↑ "theshortstory.eu" , theshortstory.eu

↑ "Intervju: Srđan Srdić" , ziher.hr