In the evocative, unexpected world of Underground Barbie, Croatian author Maša Kolanović merges the technicolor hues of childhood play with the startling and violent reality of her nation’s War of Independence. Instead of portioning imagination and historical fact as discrete realms, Kolanović aptly maps the whimsical trajectories of youth as they blur and subvert the sights and sounds of conflict, plotting out a sensitive, humorous, yet undoubtedly grounded view of how toys can give reign to both conscious and subconscious knowledge. We are proud to present this thought-provoking work as our Book Club selection for February, telling as it is about those phantasmagoric, shifty early years, where we all commence our becoming.
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Underground Barbie by Maša Kolanović, translated from the Croatian by Ena Selimović, Sandorf Passage, 2025
“Until that day I thought you could only hear such a sound at an air show, when the planes in the sky left blue, white, and red trails and the pilots performed breakneck stunts like Tom Cruise in Top Gun,” so the narrator in Maša Kolanović’s Underground Barbie marvels at hearing and seeing planes whirring past her roof. Yet, on that particular day, “all the Tom Cruises were wearing the olive-green uniform of the Yugoslav People’s Army.” As the narrator observes the transformation of the “Tom Cruise” figure—the unruly, rough-edged aviator and his indelible presence—into a token of power and destructiveness, her readers are asked to assume the perspective of a country on the precipice of seismic change.
Croatia in the 1990s held war at its epicenter, and the narrator—anonymous throughout—was then a young girl living amidst intermittent air raids, political campaigns, and displaced communities. Accumulating Barbies, whose glamor and rarity constitute a source of longing, she and her friends often took them to play in the underground basement of her apartment building, and soon enough, the narrator’s reflections turn to the various scenes that had been staged by the children. The romantic escapades of the Ken doll Dr. Kajfěs (who is named after an anti-snoring aid commercial) aside; a Barbie presidential election featuring a standoff match between Dr. Kajfěs and the much-coveted Barbie of the narrator’s friend; and more. The imitation and invention present in the girls’ everyday games gesture toward a world-making in which the old rules are dismantled, recalibrated, and improvised upon—a world in which nothing yet everything is at stake, because it is at once rooted in and removed from the material reality. Translated into English for the first time by Ena Selimović, Kolanović’s novel offers an incisive reflection on childhood play, whereby the act embodies the power of imagination that transcends socio-political codes in times of violence, uncertainty, and scarcity.
The extraordinarily difficult feat of growing up as a young woman in wartime is made even more challenging when a war of a more private nature begins to percolate through the consciousness of the children. In the narrator’s past, her days are filled to the brim with imported daily provisions, playthings, and media. She enjoys watching Fun Factory, a program tailored to the taste of children, the legendary soap opera Dynasty!, and Twin Peaks, the decade-defining cult TV show that told of the mysterious murder of a beautiful high-school student in suburban America. These works serve as her introduction to worlds beyond her knowledge and, as she experiences burgeoning sexual curiosity for the first time, they also initiate her into a realm of ill-defined, yet tacit gender roles. At school, the narrator and her girlfriends are admonished to altogether renounce sexual pleasure (“‘Masturbation is a sin!’ Sister Bernardica dictated . . . it’s The First Sin, the Original Sin, a Mortal Sin. . .”), while at home, she tries to partake in her older brother’s obsession with weapons and fighter jets, only to discover that it doesn’t hold her interest. Holding her armful of Barbies, she plays in her room to the sound of her brother’s video game outside, the door between them a deep ravine.
While Kolanović’s exposition sets the children in a socially demarcated zone of repression and restraint, they in fact inhabit a world where fantasy, rather than discipline, reins free. In her book Barbie’s Queer Accessories, Erica Rand theorizes the subversive potential of Barbies, arguing that the meaning of the doll lies not in the hands of its manufacturers but that of its consumers. Her statement turns out to be true in Underground Barbie; with their youthful waywardness, the children in the novel subject their dolls to some of their most whimsical and anarchic impulses. A notable recipient of their fancies is Dr. Kajfěs, whose disfigurement (brought on by the sprouting teeth of its owner’s baby cousin) triggers certain behavioral anomalies: namely, his unruly libido. However, the narrator reveals that these instances of transgressions are welcome:
[O]ur Barbies somehow, and only under certain circumstances, secretly reveled in this newly forged and oddly sexy identity that Dr. Kajfeš introduced to the game with all his shenanigans, sexual abuses, and overindulgences.
Physically marred and consequently deprived of his masculine vigor, Dr. Kajfěs turns into the canvas on which the children act out their gender experimentations—which could otherwise be frowned upon in an androcentric world of compulsory heterosexuality. In one instance he is the hard-boiled detective straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel, “almost always smoking a pipe and periodically taking sips from a small bottle of the world’s cheapest whiskey” while ruminating on cases of financial and marital scandals. Despite this tough exterior, however, Dr. Kajfěs becomes enamored with one of his clients, a Barbie struggling with a Ken’s adultery. Unlike the victims of infidelity existing in his imagination—“weepy, hysterical old hags” who are “periodically pummeled” by their partners—his object of desire appears a glamorous sight, “with a look that sent a small thunderbolt through him.” Throwing the lady “secretly blurred glances” that stand in contrast with her thunderbolt stare, Dr. Kajfěs knows that there is no escape from her charm. In another scenario, he’s in a craze for marriage, and ends up as an “anorexic bridegroom” by donning the body of his bride (while she becomes a “champion female bodybuilder” by inhabiting his body in return). Turning the conventions they have internalized on its head, the children, headed by the narrator, interrogate the meaning of play: can they challenge socially-controlled forces while never intending to do so? The novel’s answer is yes.
While playing with Barbies and Kens, as well as what they mirror and embody, the children are allowed to experiment with their social roles in a safe space, which also offers them a temporary refuge from the war happening outside. The narrator’s wartime life was defined by the perpetual sound of news on TV, her “straight-faced and agitated” parents talking on the phone with her extended family, and the fear of living out another unanticipated air raid. Yet she admits, with her youthful buoyancy that Selimović so deftly renders, that the war in Zagreb, “when you grew used to it, wasn’t actually all that bad.” The Barbies she collected are her beacon of light, distracting her from the brutalities she is forced to confront:
Should our building be struck by a bomb and reduced to ashes, spewing flames and black smoke, life would still be worth living if my Barbie remained whole, wearing her flashy little pink outfit with its tiny fluorescent lemons, pineapples, and bananas; her pink-and-green watermelon-shaped purse; her sunglasses; and the open-toe heels that completed the look.
In a 2022 interview with Selimović on World Literature Today, Kolanović spoke about her decision to use dolls as the vehicle to capture the vagaries of childhood and childhood play. “In anthropological terms, dolls are the perfect reduction of ourselves,” she says. “They are humanlike, and yet in our hands they are easily manipulated. . . When we play with dolls, we seem to have control over them, we breathe life into them.” The almost dreamlike tales of the Barbies thus inspire occasions of respite for the children where they find strength in the everyday, where the playing, dreaming, and creating alleviate the anxieties of living in what seems to be a permanent, all-out war.
It must be cautioned, however, that the brooding horror of violence is never truly dispelled by imagination. Reality haunts the children like an erratic beast, intruding on their amusement at the most unforeseen moments. It returns, at first, in the sensory experience—in sounds and voices, the siren of the air raids; “In my mind, I was underground,” the narrator recalls, “while aboveground there suddenly rang out that recognizable sound.” Then, it flares up in the form of ideas: the mass grave of a Ken doll’s decapitated Barbie wives, another vignette in the children’s games, readily evokes images of war-torn casualties strewn about. Moving from tangible disturbances towards the troubled subconscious, Kolanović’s thrilling insertions of the force of warfare alert us to the entwined nature of play and life, amplifying the visceral repercussions keenly felt. But signs of resilience have always been present. Plunging back into play after recovering from a small explosion, the narrator declares: “Let each get theirs—who knew how much longer this war would last!”
But the narrator knows that the war in Croatia will be over. One day, it departs, like childhood, without a sliver of indication, reflected in her distant remembrance: “How did the war even end? I no longer remember exactly, but gradually the announcements about aerial threats and other dangers . . . sailed off to the lower left corner of the television screen and never returned.” Some of her friends move away and others start dating, their lives now pivoting on boys, dance recitals, and public memorials, leaving Barbies and Kens a thing of the past. Could it be that the process of growing up is as silently momentous as the passing of war? The narrator begins, as she often did during wartime, to protect her precious possessions from harm, to arrange her dolls in a small Smurfs suitcase couched under her bed. Yet, much to her dismay, they are eventually passed on to her younger cousins. “Off they went, one by one, my Barbies, and somehow parallel with them, everyone else,” she tells us. Nevertheless, the memories associated with them remain. They crystallize into souvenirs of growth and creation, just as how Dr. Kajfěs continues to occupy the narrator’s thoughts long after taking his leave. Underground Barbie bears witness to a turbulent childhood in transition—the wonder and terror of it all, sustained by imagination.
Junyi Zhou is a writer and an Assistant Editor (Visual) at Asymptote. She received her BA from Vassar College and MPhil from the University of Cambridge, concentrating on English and film studies. Her published work can be found in Mediapolis.
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