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A °µÍø½ûÇø village beyond the boundaries of °µÍø½ûÇøia–six stories sometimes beyond the boundaries of decorum and good taste, or at least so-called decorum.The setting of MedeÅ¡i’s stories isRuski Kerestur, a village built in the Serbian region of Vojvodina as an enclave of Ruthenians who two hundred years ago left East °µÍø½ûÇøia for a better life. The writer, Ivan MedeÅ¡i is one of their descendants and the livelihood and reality of the life of his contemporaries living in Vojvodina is his major theme: the alcoholic Mire, who loses his limbs because of his drinking; Žermen the drug addict struggling desperately for another dose of heroin;the neighbour who goes so crazy from watching public television, he secretly leads cows out of barns and puts them in other people’s living rooms at the same time as rearranging all their furniture;PetrÃk, an ex-alcoholic thirty-something so provoked by the permanently drunk down-and-outs under his window he ends up killing one of them;an ex-teacher tackling his midlife crisis with perverse ideas of sex with various women from the village and masturbating in front of their windows; KriÅ¡tof, a fat boy with apparently no hope of having a better future. In the eternal struggle between body and soul, it is the body which wins in MedeÅ¡i’s work. Base physicality, captured in the artistic design of the book, permeates all its narrative layers – the soul is a very poor opponent to the body. Cleverly and humorously combining two contrasting linguistic levels, the vulgar and the intellectual, the author gives his work an unmistakablygrotesque quality.
