FICTION

MARBLE SKIN by Slavenka Drakulic. (Norton: $20; 188 pp.) Drakulic breaks so many taboos in this little novel that you can hear the stained glass shattering all the way from Zagreb. In the process of making a statue from marble called “My Mother’s Body,” Drakulic chisels out a memory of a cold elegant woman raising a child whom she treats more as an exotic and messy accessory than a girl. This is a mother you hide things from, especially anything to do with the body, like blood or desire or fear. In an apartment filled with clean linen, perfumes and old lamps, Drakulic watches her mother, lusts after her mother, through keyholes and doorways with many men, and learns that even though swooning looks like dying, it’s actually passion. Sure enough, one of the men stays, leaves his camel’s-hair coat “smelling of smoke and fog,” and his things amid their creams and bottles in the bathroom. Drakulic hammers and chisels and carves out another memory: The man in her bedroom with his hands on her. After this goes on for a while, Drakulic writes: “The body is made of blood. The body is her trailing after me, mopping up the traces of blood I scatter as I pass. . . . I couldn’t subtract myself from myself, because his presence was my only signpost towards my bodily essence.” Much later, after she has told her mother, after her mother has stayed with the man another eight years, after her mother has tried to kill herself twice, Drakulic reaches some epiphany of forgiveness. But after all the flesh and blood, it’s a paltry, symbolic thing.