Zoran Ferić

Walt Disney’s Mousetrap

Naklada MD, 1996, 124 pages
one short story available in English
complete translation available in German

Translation rights sold: France (Éditions de l’Éclisse), Germany (Folio Verlag), Poland (Pogranicze Sejny), Ukraine (Lavov), Slovenia (…)

Ten stories in Walt Disney’s Mousetrap present Ferić as a brilliant analyst of stupidity, misconceptions, malice and vulgarity. His revelatory stories hit us right there where it hurts the most and where laughter – freezes.

DIE WOCHE

Behind the title of one of these stories, standing as a paradigm for the world in the entire book, Ferić collected narratives which make use of black humor, the grotesque and an exposition of the absurd, in order to create a world so close to ours that the reader might feel a considerable chill. Stories of gravediggers playing with doctors of science from the Institute of Atomic Physics situated near the cemetery, of the man who uses his Mickey Mouse watch to rape a ten year old girl and the married couple trying to overcome their son’s suicide with music. Among the characters here is a man whose parents were killed in the war and Ambrozije Testen, a Franciscan monk who paints an act of a very obese woman. Each of these stories explicitly shows how people can be confined by body and history, which acts as a source of their misfortune. These texts, sometimes composed as classical novels and sometimes as short psychological stories, take a comic approach to death and illness, while the war in Croatia during the nineties and its tragedy is marked as a visible yet unrevealed place; something that arouses strong emotions, but is never talked about. Symbolic images related to these texts are Auschwitz and Disneyland. And it is clear that Disneyland is by no means a nicer place than the most notorious concentration camp in history. Walt Disney’s Mousetrap has been translated into German, Polish, Ukranian and Slovenian. In Croatia, the book was published in three editions by Naklada MD, Profil International and V.B.Z.
It is the first and, unfortunately, the last book which won the Dekada Award, founded to honor the most influential book of the decade. Although the award was discontinued in Croatia, it still emphasizes the awareness of the importance of Ferić’s book for contemporary Croatian prose. The stories in this book retain some basic features of his earlier texts and although displaying a greater deepth, the grotesquerie and absurdity of his narrative world remain. Ferić is a lover of literary parables.

What is made emphatic in the text is its refined construction. Ferić often combines motifs into a single unit, creating space for unexpected twists. He often models his stories according to the principles of music; they develop into a rondo of naughtiness, while the author, despite providing readers with a picture of human tragedy, using laconic sarcasm, he opens spaces for laughter to run free.
Der Standard

Ferić’s prose is insidious, dangerous and beautiful as a snake. A real treat. F
Frakfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Very amusing, very whimsical in all cases, and sometimes macabre: these ten ultimately grotesque stories are the pure enjoyment of reading.

ÖKS, CULTURAL

Meet The Author

An Angel In Offside

ByZoran Ferić

Naklada MD, 2000, 174 pages
One short story translated in English
complete translation in German

Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Spain (Baile del sol Ediciones), Ukraine (Folio), Slovenia

Declared as the book of the decade in Croatia while being on bestseller list for more than two years, this extraordinary collection of short stories presents author`s recognizable grotesque world but offering us a more complex and consistent structure.

The Death Of The Little Match Girl

ByZoran Ferić

Naklada MD, 2003, 198 pages
complete translation available in English, German, Italian

Translation rights sold: France (Editions Noir sur Blanc), USA (Autumn Hill Books), Germany (Folio Verlag), Italy (Nikita Editore), Slovenia (V.B.Z.), Turkey (Dora Basım Yayın)

A “Mediterranean Twin Peaks”, this social novel with a distincive crime-plot powerfuly provokes a deeply entranched bourgeois taste but is also an allegory for the atmosphere in the entire country of the 90s as the war and death find their very unispected and unusual ways to present.

The Children Of Patras

ByZoran Ferić

Biblioteka Premijera, Jutarnji List, 2005, 188 pages
complete translation in German and Italian

Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Italy (Zandonai editore), Slovenia (V.B.Z.)

This novel, with a well-rounded and compact plot, deals with a provocative theme: the love between a forty year old highschool teacher and an ill seventeen year old schoolgirl. Although the theme is somewhat controversial and the relationship essentially comic, Feric writes about the true love; the kind of “funny” or strange love that transcends boundaries, questions moral laws, constantly mocking the tragic nature of death.

The Maya Calendar

ByZoran Ferić

Profil International, 2011, 603 pages
40 pages excerpts in English
complete translation in German

Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Bulgaria (Avangard Print)

Considered by many to be Ferić’s best work. A novel of wider scope which incorporates a novel about growing up in Zagreb in the fifties and sixties of the last century, a story about the love between Senka and Tihomir that almost lasts a lifetime and a novel about the sexual revolution in the sixties and the seventies. Ferić covers all aspects of life – happiness, love, sorrow, old age and mortality.

Alone By The Sea

ByZoran Ferić

VBZ, November, 2015, 341 pages
Excerpt of the novel available in English

Translation rights sold: Germany (Folio Verlag), Serbia (Booka)

Four years after the great literary success of The Maya Calendar Zoran Ferić returns to the scene with the novel that deals with man-woman’s relationships and its peripeteias. But unlike in the voluminous Calendar, here the author doesn’t write the complete life stories of its characters but rather catches them in the key episodes where those lives start to form or refract. The whole is fractured, but the novel is completed and rounded.

The Travelling Theatre

ByZoran Ferić

VBZ, November, 2020, 476 pages

Translation rights sold: Serbia (Booka)

The Traveling Theatre, the fifth novel by Zoran Ferić, a readers’ favorite and one of the most awarded and acclaimed Croatian authors, is an impressive work, a novel that would mark a grand event in any of the great European literatures

A harbour town on the Adriatic serves as a backdrop for dreams which some people use for business, others for films and a few to make their fortune.