Barbi Marković’s novel “Minihorror” – Culture

The horror in this book is one of everyday life, and it is terribly funny, even the first sentences are terribly frightening: “Mini and Miki want to be nice, but nothing is easy. The world is terrible, everything has to die. The two of them have to pretty much suffer a lot, and that’s exactly why we love them.”

Miki comes from a village in Tyrol and Mini from Žarkovo, a suburb of Belgrade, they live together in an apartment in Vienna, in a world that is thoroughly bourgeois and intellectually saturated, you read Joan Didion and watch “The Little Shop of Horrors”. Barbi Marković reports on her attempts to be nice and her sufferings in the stories of her fifth book. Sometimes they suffer together, sometimes alone.

Once they go to Mini’s hometown, finally visit her family there, and Mini has to go into the hole in the garden and everyone swears and spit into the hole. Once she – Mini is an author and travels a lot for readings – was asked right at the beginning of an interview for the radio: Mini, you look different. Do you feel like an Austrian? Her real name is apparently Minerva.

Once, at the beginning of December, the two of them go to Miki’s parents in a small town, and then they go on to the farm, to Miki’s extended family, to bake cookies. Mini has to get used to the local way of speaking, “guat, guat, guat, guat, guat”, and the men, according to a rural custom (which is also known in the Bavarian Alps), dress up as monsters with wild masks Costing thousands of euros, they attack other people with uninhibited desire.

There is a somnambulistic mini- and mikimalism in this book. The narrative is paratactic. Sentence follows sentence; the connections between them are as laconic as they are dizzying. Sometimes within a sentence everything turns unreal, witch-like: “Mini looks at the women. When one of them loses a finger in the dough and immediately forms a new one out of the dough, Mini narrows his eyelids.” With a friend they meet in a bar, it’s the other way around: he falls apart in five minutes, his parts are everywhere. “Even on the bar.”

Separation, growth, deformation, that is the principle of this storytelling; we know it from the early subversive cartoons by Tex Avery or Chuck Jones. It is a disturbingly unreal principle, a far cry from the shocks of surrealism that have now become almost comfortable. In the world of mini-horror there is an order that refuses to be trusted. Freud described dream work by reducing the abstract to the concrete underlying it: “What is so superfluous can easily appear incoherent.”

If there are connections and approaches as to how strange things could be explained, the absurd horror does not diminish. Miki suddenly sees his face printed on a T-shirt in Lugner City, then also on pajamas and a hoodie. A man pushing past him in the checkout line at the store looks like him, and so do a few other people in line. Finally he discovers his almost identical image on Dr. Mortimer, plastic surgery practice. Triumph of deformation: “Sometimes we just find things that resemble us nice. And sometimes we would like to get rid of them along with ourselves.”

Many small sketches of characters with large, round ears make it clear who is behind Miki and Mini, Disney’s famous mouse characters. One day they went on vacation to the nudist island of Ada Bojana in Montenegro. “The vacation is over, but life goes on, in different directions. Into the past, where everything undigested molds, and into the future until death anyway.” At some point the lyrics take on a new urgency, which Mini writes, “an ugly little Scheherezade… telling for her life.”

In the appendix there is, very briefly, in a few sentences with a sketch each, “15 more possible horrors with Mini and Miki”, pure mini-horror, that is, you are glad that nothing is told here: “Miki coughs on someone and transmits it to him a terrible virus. Actually, eye contact is enough for transmission. Everyone looks at the ground.”