You Are So Mine

Sitting on various literary juries sometimes has the advantage of allowing privileged readers a first glance at literature that it is not yet possible to find in books or magazines, of allowing a new voice that might otherwise remain silent before the publication of a first book to cast an early light over the literary horizon. I am extremely pleased to report such a happy event. A story, which I read enthusiastically as a jury  member at a recent contest (realizing only after it was chosen by the jury that it was written by Erica Johnson Debeljak ) […] has now been published in a collection of eleven stories with the title Tako si moj (You Are So Mine). That the book has appeared in the most elite series of the largest Slovenian publishing house is no coincidence.  

The prose of Erica Johnson Debeljak surprises with its stylistic calm, its precision, its gently controlled restraint. Many of the events experienced by the stories’ protagonists are described almost by the way, without emphasis, and are that much more effective for it. At first glance, the stories are about ordinary, even uninteresting predicaments, in which ordinary people atttempt to make their lives feel authentic or fulfilled. These narratives are often shot through with sentences that give individual stories a new meaning. In the story The Bowerbird’s Nest, we learn this about a teenage girl who has misbehaved: “What she had done was nothing more and nothing less than an imperative: the dropping of a heavy black curtain over the caged flurry in her chest.” […] The story She’s a Little Bit Unsure about the Formation of Clouds closes with an almost lyrical image: “Her gaze returns to the night sky. A light snow is falling through the darkness outside. The street light in front of the house illuminates a broad halo of individual silver flakes, catching just a small part of their long descent to earth.”

The world that provides the backdrop to the stories in You Are So Mine is a world of openness and therefore a world in which things can go wrong, depending on the situation, from one thought to the next, one decision to the next. The collection […]  is a pleasure to read. Each story offers the reader a new contingency, a new bafflement that makes it necessary to read to the end. To a new surprise or a new resolution. To understand how the enigma will be solved, if at all. In my opinion, You Are So Mine is the short story triumph of the literary season.

Igor Bratož, Delo, January 23, 2008

 

The stories in You Are So Mine deal with the various anxieties, fears, and sadnesses that permeate contemporary life. Nevertheless, the author of these stories, Erica Johnson Debeljak, succeeds in an entirely unsentimental way in bringing the reader to the bare pleasure of, for example, a renewed encounter between lovers or just the calming embrace of ordinary life. The great distinction of these stories is their deft vacillation beween two extremes either of which alone might be excessive: between the elevated disappointment of the convinced nihilist and the melodramatic emotions of happy or unhappy love.

In You Are So Mine, Erica Johnson Debeljak presents a complex world. She holds a private mirror up to the real world in which the author places her unique stories. Each individual story subtly builds on the next, consolidating the conviction of the reader that her writing style is as taut as it is intelligent. The unobtrusive, sensitive, and lively flow of narrative weaves together arresting images with parallel events. The dual function of these images – to anchor the stories in the realm of fecund experience and to imbue them with symbolic or metaphorical meaning – is admirably executed. The writer’s approach is dignified enough not to trivialise and cunning enough not to aestheticise the feelings of her characters.  Free of pretension and exaggeration, this is a book that is provocative in the most refined way.  

Špela Brecelj, Sodobnost No. 2, 2008

 

Erica Johnson Debeljak has written eleven extraordinary stories, published by Mladinska knjiga in a collection entitled Tako si moj (You Are So Mine). The narrators of these stories are mostly women, from young girls to middle-aged women, describing an everyday life that at times seems routine and at other times more like an earthquake, as violent as a tsunami. The women fantasize and dream, tremble and suffer, give birth and die and love. Debeljak is a master at weaving a mysterious fabric from the secret depths of her characters and their relationships. […]  

The stories in You Are So Mine are technically polished and written with an stylistic mastery equal to that of the very best writers. They are worthy of readers […]  who give great care and concentration to reading, who immerse themselves in literature. In other words, Erica Johnson Debeljak writes such good stories  that they are transformed as they are read – they are no only hers but become ours – and this only happens with the best literature.  

Manca Košir, January 2008

http://www.rtvslo.si/blog/mancakosir/vrhunski-zenski-pisavi/6017