Stories about the foreign and at the same time the beautiful, about growing up between cultures, home and longing.
What does one mean when one says home? Where does one call home? Home is not found, but it catches up with you, appears in the rearview mirror as soon as you want to break out. From Zagreb, Klagenfurt or Vienna to Tehran it is often only a leap of thought. Anna Baar is less interested in locations and alleged sights than in what is secret and concealed. She looks closely, crosses pain thresholds, tells us of the grandmother who fought against the Nazis in the Second World War and had to flee from her own people into her cellar during the Yugoslavian fratricidal war, of the once beautiful, admired woman who, as a sick old woman, does not allow herself to be made up for her friends from Carinthia. It is always about being different, about the hatred of the German Carinthians against the Carinthian Slovenes and Yugoslavs, the childhood scent of almonds and dried figs, about pride and shame of one’s homeland, about the realization that beautiful words are not good for naming the terrible.
At times angry, at other times tender and cheerful, Anna Baar writes against her own speechlessness, struggling to find precise words for the unspeakable and the glossed-over. Her preoccupation with the past aims at the present.
A profound, political and highly topical book.
Anna Baar, born 1973 in Zagreb (former Yugoslavia). Childhood and youth in Vienna, Klagenfurt and on the Dalmatian Island of Brac. Her debut novel »Die Farbe des Granatapfels« was on the ›ORF Bestenliste‹ for three months, her novel »Nil« for two months. In 2020 she was awarded the ›Humbert-Fink-Literaturpreis‹. Anna Baar lives in Klagenfurt and Vienna.
