Algoritam, 2012, 144 pages
Translation rights sold: Serbia (Književna radionica Rašić), Slovenia (V.B.Z.), Ukraine (Vydavnytstvo 21)
The rustle of death and nature that imperceptibly claims back the world.
The award-winning poet translated into thirty languages shows a new prose face. Eleven short stories that make up this collection offer a new technique of exposing the dishevelled reality.
Using interesting turns of perspective, we are at times presented with the point of view of something, rather than someone. Such is the story The Pizza Master That Carried Death in His Mouth, where a four-time twisted report is given to us by a quince.
Pogačar creates a heavy atmosphere where even the most innocent descriptions of the sfumato scenes result in numbness, unease and premonition of a bad event, or even complete absence of all future events. The leaden sky with birds that seem to be there only to crash into windows and/or die, the scent of decay, the sound of the apocalypse that has yet to happen, and may have even happened by now.
However, Pogačar’s post-apocalypse is not akin to Hermann’s Jeremiah, but rather to Bela Tar from The Turin Horse: slow, stark, repetitive, static, and sometimes satirical, sedimented, framed with interior places and plains that easily blends with the sky, so that desolation rules both up and down. And God does not seem that keen on helping.
