Consoling the boy

The world of Radovan Beli Marković’s superbly written short stories comprises the familiar and the strange, the known and the unknown, the local and the universal. Their topography coincides with the one found on maps, but the fairytale-like cruelty encountered in the villages and towns places them in the realm of the imaginary. The characters inhabiting them are rendered as refl ections in a papermirror, distorted just enough to reveal that which lies beneath the surface, appealing to an onlooker as much as flesh stripped of skin.