Thursday, April 29, 2020: Chicago, IL
Still here, bringing the world into my apartment through literature and candy.
Trader Joe’s Bunny Gummy Tummies
This holiday-themed take on Trader Joe’s Gummy Tummies has its main surprise in the in the centers of little bunnies, rather than penguins, but brings another unexpected treat: the bunnies are sour. They’re not sour like Sour Patch Kids or your standard sour gummy worms, which have a burst of sourness from the dusting on the outside followed by what seems (probably just by contrast) like excessive, cloying sweetness. These sour bunnies stay sour all the way through. It’s pretty nice.
They’re not as fruity as the main Gummy Tummies and only have fruit juice for coloring, but they have good flavors that are varied and distinct across yellow, orange, and reddish-pink colors. The juicy centers of these ones do not collapse and melt as noticeably as those of their penguin brethren, but I’d still buy again next Easter.
The Death of the Little Match Girl by Zoran Feric
The debut novel from modern Croatian great Zoran Feric starts with a stark, emotional scene. The narrator has returned to his native island for the funeral of a lifelong friend’s six-year-old daughter. From the beginning, we feel Zoric’s comic touch, capturing the family’s horror with the minimum adequacy while sardonically relaying the day’s events and the backstories of everyone involved: “My friend, the dead girl’s father, had wished she was a boy. The two of them would have looked forward to the spring when the soccer playoffs began.” This line turns out to be a hint for realer, more complex forays into gender identity. The curious stranger seated next to our narrator adds the color he may have missed in his years living in the capital, Zagreb, gossip which becomes critical as the story morphs into a pair of mysteries regarding the little girl’s death and another in town.
Though the title apparently draws inspiration from the Hans Christian Andersen story, Feric’s depiction of a winding, bumblingly incompetent Mediterranean crime investigation brings to mind an Andrea Camalleri with edgier subplots. Feric neatly summarizes the basics himself on the back cover of my version: “I wrote a Mediterranean Twin Peaks in which transvestites get killed, corpses get stolen, sawn in half and left to dry in the wind, in which devils are exorcised, people communicate with spirits and all of it is spiced up with sex and humor.” Some of the book’s language, particularly on LGBTQ subject matter, has not aged well, but his at times profane insensitivity and generally bawdy sarcasm belie a more series subject matter.
Like with the general mockery of his old friends that mask his portrayal of a family’s grief, Feric stealthily laces the story of murder investigations with oblique insight into the war embroiling Croatia and its neighbors at the time of the book’s events. He even examines the religious institutions whose belief systems became deeply intertwined with the ethnicities that took up arms against one another. This era, it turns out, bears particular relevance for us today, not only as ethnic nationalism and right-wing hatred rise again in Central and Eastern Europe (and elsewhere). In a strange twist of fate, recent experiences with war – provided the country’s infrastructure, economy, and healthcare have to an extent recovered – can be useful in a pandemic. From the New York Times:
In Croatia, many remember being barricaded indoors and hearing sirens blaring for weeks on end during the conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s. Ive Morovic, a 45-year-old barber in the Croatian coastal town of Zadar, believes the disciplined, collected way in which Croats have responded to the pandemic harks back to wartime and the legacy of communism.
“People are afraid, and the discipline we all learned helps us get in line and creates some sort of forced unity,” he said.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
For more Croatian classics, try the rest of The Best of Croatian Literature series from publisher VBZ. These titles dot the English language shelves of every bookstore I visited in the country and seem like a good entry point to the recent canon there.
Gummies and Orange Soda 