Underground Barbie

A young girl survives the Croatian War of Independence while playing dolls with her friends in Kolanović’s unsettling English-language debut. Nationalist tensions are rising when the unnamed narrator receives her first Barbie, a coveted status symbol. Her Serbian friends move away as Croatia attempts to secede from Yugoslavia, provoking frequent air raids. As the fighting intensifies, the narrator retreats with her family and neighbors into the basement of their building. Kolanović seldom refers to the war’s events directly, instead infusing the conflict’s tensions and horrors into the extended narrative of the children’s make-believe. For example, a knockoff Ken doll transforms into a central antagonist whom the girls name Dr. Kajfeš, embodying what they view as the ugliness of non-Western culture. They cast Kajfeš as a womanizer, rapist, politician, and mass murderer, echoing the violence around them. Complementing the narrative are childlike line-drawings that are often disturbing in their naivete: people huddled in a basement, one leader’s propaganda replaced with another’s, headless bodies. Kolanović’s pop culture references don’t always fit seamlessly into the narrative—a description of Twin Peaks devolves into mere summary—but by and large, the juxtaposition of child’s play and real-world violence is chilling. This is worth a look. (Jan.)