Genre
Short stories
Year of publication
2016
Number of pages
147
Rights sold
Mexico (Ediciones Arlequín)
Materials
Tags
growing up, transition from childhood to adulthood, adolescence, family, gender issues, social exclusion, transience of life
Noben glas
No Voice
by Suzana Tratnik
The protagonist of No Voice, a collection of seven short stories, is a young girl on the threshold between childhood and adolescence. She experiences the world around her from a no longer child’s but a not yet adult perspective. The death of her grandmother, the brutality of her teacher, the painful sense of exclusion and her parents' divorce are underlined by fantasy elements, by irony and humour, and by a child’s interpretation of the world that collides with an adult, much more sombre and tedious outlook on life.
Out of all of Suzana Tratnik’s works, No Voice is the purest description of confronting the transient nature of life at a young age and a profound depiction of transition from a perhaps not perfectly happy, but still enjoyable and familiar world into the lonely world of adulthood that comes too soon, a world of false hopes and heavy burdens.
Awards and nominations
Novo mesto Award for best short story collection 2017
Shortlisted for the Kritiško sito Award for best book of the year 2017
Reviews
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The book is an example of healthy, almost lapidary realism with some excursions into the fantastic, and demonstrates, above all, the author’s feel for constructing the event within the short story.
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The stories, which pull the reader in on many different levels, including with their direct and horrifying conclusions, are among the purest examples of literature, or of presenting reality through fiction. In this sense, they are masterpieces.
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With her short story book No Voice, the author proves herself as one of the top Slovenian fiction writers. Her narrative skills particularly shine in the short story genre. Throughout her oeuvre, Tratnik's stories evidence her remarkable feel for dense narration and her great ear for humanity, as embodied by her favourite literary character who also narrates the stories - a little girl who's growing up.