»Der ferkelfarbene Himmel über Osteuropa (The piglet-colored sky over Eastern Europe)

The reading of an excerpt of »Der ferkelfarbene Himmel über Osteuropa (The piglet-colored sky over Eastern Europe)« by Ilka Papp-Zakor is in German.
Read by Barbara Stoll

 

 

 

Sooner or later, the mother becomes a brick-colored locomotive, an abandoned pregnant girl gives birth to nine double begonias, the grandmother is home to all kinds of animals and knocking lemurs help pensioners with malicious telephone pranks.

With the directness typical of the genre and a fast-paced narrative style, Ilka Papp-Zakor’s short stories allow us to look at the all too often absurd and disempowering conditions of everyday life in a fantasy world. Within the protected space of reading, they relate how the violent, selfish, naive or sad Eastern European characters must cope in a post-human, semi-virtual world.

Ilka Papp-Zakor’s themes are sadly topical, as in Yuri Gagarin, in which a father rejects his son, who lives abroad, with ideological narrow-mind, and takes out his world-weariness and frustration on him in a two-faced, passive-aggressive way. In recent decades, migration from Eastern European countries has reached threatening proportions, and is already causing great tension in both daily and family life in many places.

Nebensächlich, Nomade – Ungewiss übertragene Gedichte was published in the Edition Solitude.