Improvement Day - Alena Begić

Grotesque, spiced with black humour, guarantees a wicked reading adventure. If we add to this the audacity with which the writer most wittily tackles even a topic that usually makes us cringe, out of fear or discomfort: death and its physical equivalent, the grave, then it is more than enough. A good read, we could say.

The world is a cold, impenetrable wall, and its protagonists are the same: neurotic, narcissistic, apathetic individuals, kept alive only by the pulsing blood in their temples. Their outbursts of hostility and helplessness are grotesque, and their communication is extremely impoverished, focused on their own emptiness and, in some places, on the verge of pathology. Yet the stories collected in this collection are quite entertaining.