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. READ MORE…
