Barbi Markovic:

“Who is at war with whom, who belongs to whom?”

(Bild: Apallonia Theresa Bitzan)

Author Barbi Markovic was a guest in Dornbirn. In the big "Krone" interview, she talks about the scary things in everyday life and the power of humor.

"Krone": Ms. Markovic, your book "Mini Horror", which won the Leipzig Book Fair prize, offers quite a lot of scary material. Does life really have that much potential to scare us?
Barbi Markovic: It's funny that when reading this book, everyone is so surprised at how much fear there is in life, because we are mortal and really vulnerable - as individuals and as a society. There are so many reasons to be afraid. Fortunately, we are not designed to be constantly aware of all dangers. But once you start, every glass of water becomes dangerous.

The horror is also political. In the USA, Trump will now be president again, in Austria the Freedom Party made a big splash in the last election, and even in Vorarlberg the shift to the right is noticeable. How scary is that?
My hope is that such a negative, gloomy phase will be followed by a hopeful, solidary one. Somehow a momentum has to be created. It's frightening what I'm about to say, but this feeling of solidarity often arises after wars, when everyone is fed up with people dying senselessly. Maybe it works without everything having to perish first.

Back to "Mini Horror". The book is often compared to works by Edgar Allan Poe, it's about the frightening, the creepy, but also always about the plausible.
I always enjoy finding the problematic in the ordinary. I don't know why, but portraying social horror was comforting for me. That we admit it for once. That it's not normal. That it's actually a horror, what we sometimes participate in or cause on a daily basis.

Barbi Markovic at her appearance at the Leipzig Book Fair - and her award-winning book "Mini Horror".

(Bild: picturedesk.com/Hendrik Schmidt / dpa)

Every book you write is preceded by a concept. How do you put it together, how does it come about?
It comes from the panicked fear that I'll end up with nothing. And from a lack of confidence in my genius. So I have to come up with something. It's a little different every time. I ask myself what I want to write about and what formal possibilities open up with this topic. With "Die verschissene Zeit", it was about remembering, about bringing the past to life. That's when I thought of the role play, in which other people can also position themselves. In my latest book, the "Piksi book", I work with soccer commentary. I always set myself little rules so that it doesn't get completely out of hand, because after all, the narrative possibilities are endless.

What was it like with your book "Ausgehen"?
I was working in a publishing house at the time, copyright was an issue and music books were in. At the time, a DJ was being sued by Jay Z because he had made a mash-up album. I asked myself how far I could go, whether I could also write a remix, something semi-forbidden? So I worked with Thomas Bernhard's "Gehen". I discovered that I could actually tell my story with his voice. Actually, it wasn't so much writing as a math problem.

Humor is a central element in your work, how do you use it? As a tool, a source of strength, a survival aid?
Humor makes life colorful and is not always nice, well-behaved and comforting. For me, it's a way of thinking, but humor doesn't just have one function, I certainly use it in at least six different ways.

Some authors have a very fixed daily routine, writing from about 4 o'clock in the morning.
Who actually does that, I ask myself?

Humor makes life colorful and is not always nice, well-behaved and comforting. For me, it's a way of thinking.

Barbi Markovic

Haruki Murakami supposedly does that.
Okay, if I could afford it, I would do it too. I dream of such a life, because today, for example, I wrote as much as I could on the train, because there's no other way. At the moment, my job feels like I have seven different jobs and nobody knows anything about the others.

Stress?
Yes, but there are other kinds of stress. I really enjoy doing it. It's not without its problems, but I've had worse jobs.

The literary industry is repeatedly criticized, how do you feel about the gearbox, how do you feel about it?
I can compare it with a much worse book market where you don't earn any money at all, namely the Serbian market. From that point of view, I'm happy, sure it's always precarious, but somehow this lottery with grants and the like works. Every now and then you get something for free. I have no certainty about how things will be in three years' time, but I don't feel that the world owes me anything. If I can no longer make a living from writing, then I'll see how I survive. And if I can no longer survive, then I'll have to die. In any case, I am glad that there is support for authors and publishers in Austria.

The situation is probably even more brutal in the visual arts.
It's even worse there, because in literature at least there is fixed book pricing, which prevents me from having to suck up to millionaires.

Has the price of the Leipzig Book Fair changed anything?
Yes, everything has tripled. I'm trying to shovel away what has accumulated. Only then can I really say what has changed in my life. Now it's just more emails, more jobs, more trips.

You said before that you don't even know what will happen in three years' time.
Okay, that was a bit of a lie, because I've just committed myself until 2028. But after that, I really don't know.

Committed to?
Plays, books, commissions.

How much can you write in a year?
I don't know, only time will tell. In any case, I've written two books since March. Yes, they were panic-written books, and thin, but the soccer book is perhaps my best so far. Then there was the poetry lecture. It was chaos, but it worked out.

Is the "Piksi book" actually about soccer?
It's actually about the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Ten-year-old Barbi Markovic happens to be the main protagonist, and she spends her childhood in the soccer stadium: the mob, the roaring "we" - and then there's the war. All this is shown on the basis of two soccer matches, reported in the tone of the soccer commentator. It was very entertaining for me, I appreciate these people who can make text out of nothing for hours on end.

Isn't that also about the big emotion?
A bit too, but I'm actually making fun of it. I didn't even want to write the book, I was forced to, it's the embodiment of my inability to say no. The theme is socialism versus capitalism, the old us versus the new us. The grief about the nature of the world.

That's what it still seems to be about.
It's a huge rupture and I think it's one of the most important issues in the world. Affiliations, identities, who is at war with whom, who belongs to which us? You can deal with that for the rest of your life without coming to terms with it.

Do you sometimes worry that you might run out of ideas at some point?
Three times a day, but I also have new ideas three times a day. I don't have a lot of confidence. I also constantly ask myself whether my things were good or bad. Somewhere deep inside is a weird driving force that has nothing to do with my self-confidence. I have all the self-doubt in the world, but that doesn't stop me from carrying on.