RARE SWAN PRESS. Unfolding Universes One Book At A Time.

Description:

Since I Bought A Swan

An unexpected meeting, a flailing marriage and an emotionally fatal attraction, turns the ordinary, almost mundane life of an unsuspecting librarian, upside down and changes both her life and her soul, forever. “Since I Bought A Swan”, tells the love story between two women, turned into tempestuous, passionate obsession. In writing this tender, yet fierce novella, Tanja openly and publicly acknowledges its birth in autobiographical experience and broke open the social and cultural prejudices when the book was first released on the literary scene in the Balkans.

What begins as an incidental and casual friendship between two vastly different women, one, older, passively trying to adapt to difficult life circumstances, the younger, focused on artistic, though flailing activism. Despite the difference in both in age and social contexts, what draws them together, are the commonalities of their ordinary lives; both are outsiders, seeking but never finding acceptance, both face ‘dead-ends’ and in each other, they individually unearth unexpected secrets about themselves which as their mutual obsession unfolds, transcends into an existential struggle, everything they thought they knew about themselves, the others, and the world they live in, face a questioning temptation

Written in an epistolary form, Since I Bought A Swan is poetic, philosophical, and inter-textual, using allusions to Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, and Ionesco, while also offering a subtle and elegant critique of social criticism and speaks of the Balkan prejudices towards homosexual and lesbian love.

“When she writes of women’s experience, she writes of everyday experience and by this points out the position of women in a male dominant society. Writing about love, relationships and marriage, everyday problems are at the centre of her poetics. Love and marriage are not naïve or commonplace, but are the points of departure depicting the subdued position of women, as well as of the female body, their sexuality, motherhood, infatuation, growing up, getting old,
divorcing, and ultimately dying. All these themes are presented as the essence of women’s experience. Diverse characters and perspectives make the poetic world richer and more versatile. A multitude of voices and experiences make this book of poetry more comprehensive and enables these poems to communicate with a great number of different life experiences of its readers.“

EXCERPT

It was raining. As it does today. As it does throughout the whole of spring filled with floods. You were looking for a boring book. Was it so? These are stories where a woman minces and demurs and still cheats on her husband with a younger man. A young lover then pretends to be a hotshot and is cooled when he got all he wanted. But all is not enough as the whole thing becomes sweeter. Because the body follows the line of hunger. Later on, he becomes hooked, as older women have some magic the young ones don’t. The magic to keep the excess sentences for oneself and the lack of tenderness they have in bed with their husbands, they share with their lovers. The magic of excess of the dream of love. I murmured something cynical about that book. I can’t remember what. You smiled. Was it a movie smile? No. That was the smile of a girl who just removed a dental plate. I guess it melted me. I always melt with bizarre things. Something within me stirred when you walked in the door with that boring book in your hands, with which you were delighted as I learned later. And I hardly waited for you to return and to see you again. Luckily you were a fast reader. Or you skipped pages. I do it, I admit. Both horny young men and mature ladies annoyed me at the time as well as they do now. Not the attraction and little vile tricks but its long flow. I absolutely understand those young men and ladies. And the irrevocable force that attracts them, but I don’t understand writers who torture both them and us on so many pages. You told me I lost compassion and that I worked for a long time only with books. That I became numb. Something like that. And then you woke me up. That was your venture. 
“As young men wake up ladies,” you said, “you missed that.”
“You don’t like French literature. Love and adultery everywhere? Serbian? War and warfare. Dead fathers, dead sons. Mourning mothers. Migrations. Divisions. The soil in and around the mouth. Suffering and demise. Latin American? Passionate fucking and passionate warfare. Eros and Thanatos. Surreal. American? Russian? Certainly Russian.

You are like Dostoyevsky. When you speak of life, I have a feeling that you drag me into an atmosphere of the airless dens of his novels. And those half-people, half-martyrs, criminals, and penitents. In short, lunatics. Did you read Nabokov’s essay on Dostoyevsky and his sick characters? He didn’t quite appreciate him.”
I stopped your interpretations trying to contradict you:
“And Nabokov’s horny professor who seduces Lolita is more normal than those losers?”
“He certainly is. Wouldn’t you rather be like Humbert? Better to sleep with your students than kill babies and pretend to be righteous. Aren’t you a Professor Humbert? A female one. You run away because you can’t imagine Lolita either with you or with someone else.”

AUTHOR:

Tanja Stupar Trivunović

TRANSLATOR:

Petar Penda

ISBN: 978-3-9525290-4-1