The seventeen stories in On the Threshold were selected by the author in collaboration with his translator, and they represent a cross section of Dušan Mitana’s writing, which is characterized by a duality of the rational and the irrational, connecting everyday banal plots with elements of tension, hyperbole, secrecy, and dreams. In stories such as “A Hot Afternoon,” a banal situation–buying cigarettes at a pub on a sweltering afternoon–takes a Hitchcockian turn when the main character refuses to buy a beer alongside his cigarettes. He finds himself trapped in the pub, guarded by a vigilante bartender and his beer-obsessed patrons, and his every attempt at escape is foiled until their life-giving elixir, the beer, runs out. In other stories Mitana casually inserts mystical or supernatural elements into otherwise realistic narratives. In “The Breeze and the Others,” for example, an unhappily married woman is impregnated by her elderly neighbor who lives in a building across the street and with whom she never actually has physical contact–by way of the breeze. And just as his attention creates life within her, his own life waxes as wanes with her gaze and attention.
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