Mirjam Dular, in her bilingual collection of short stories Vzporedni svetovi/Parallel Worlds, unfolds scenes with a keen poetic sensibility and the precision of a film camera, in which dramas of power emerge from the smallest shifts – a glance, a word, a gesture. Women and men observe, exchange, test, and transform one another: vulnerability emerges from objectified bodies, strength from vulnerability; chance encounters become almost ritual moments, while art (painting, sculpture, music) becomes another name for desire. The author moves fluidly between registers – from lucid humour to the chilling proximity of crime, from dream logic to a cold reality in which violence can erupt.
Her prose is clear, rhythmic, devoid of unnecessary gestures; every line of dialogue strikes like a perfectly measured beat. What distinguishes her writing is the combination of poetic sharpness and dramaturgical economy: the sentence is clean, the image precise, the reversal inexorable. Dular trusts her readers, leaving them room for interpretation, yet never obscuring the ethical tension.
Between the lines, she also lays bare aspects of ourselves: Slovenian reserve, the discomfort of speaking with a collective voice, the stubborn insistence that “everything must be done according to the rules”, the melancholy we sometimes prefer to disguise beneath an orderly appearance. And yet, in these stories, it is precisely this reserve that begins to open up – in a song, in a glance, in a moment of acknowledgement when we realise that beneath the stereotype of quiet propriety smoulder the fever of desire, fears, and tenderness.
This is a book that catches us “almost alone in a room” – and does not leave us unchanged.
The collection is part of the Contemporary Stories from Slovenia book series, through which we aim to bring contemporary Slovenian prose closer to readers beyond Slovenia.
