Literature » Književnost | 39 Ispostavilo seda jeknjiževnost mnogimženama pomoglada prebrode mračanperiod pandemije It turned out that literature helped many women to get through the dark period of the pandemic zegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia, with participants ranging in age from 17 to 84. Considering that one of the goals was to develop a critical overview of women’s creativity, participants in the reading rooms discussed books by Daša Drndić, Ivana Bodrožić, Lejla Kalamujić, Rumena Bužarovska, Lucia Berlin and Elena Ferrante, with the works of these authoresses prompting important discussions about the position of women, their mental health and the issue of collective responsibility for past and present events. The writers whose works were discussed were also invited to some of the reading rooms as surprise guests, which led to dynamic discussions. The participants had positive experiences. “The conversations I participated inwere finally something good in this strange time of the corona. This project showed me that books connect people,” saidMersida Meštrović from Bosnia-Herzegovina, a retired military official and a “new” grandmother, while Croatian writer and activist Barbara Matejčić summed up her experience poetically in one sentence: “To read and think with rebellious women, I could do in rhythm forever”. The Rebellious reading rooms received their follow-up last autumn. The second part of this story implied the recording of audio podcasts during autumn and encompassed discussions among participants on the works of contemporary authoresses: Sally Rooney, Margaret Atwood, Elena Ferrante, Rumena Bužarovska and Daša Drndić. Together with the reading rooms, the podcasts, which are available on the website bookvica.net, enabled regional networking and comparisons between the stances of women from different generations. Although literature always formed the basic framework of the conversation, the participants developed their discussions to a broader, socio-political level. Despite their differences, the participants agreed that the cited authoresses succeed in presenting social structures that produce inequalities which break human lives, particularly the lives of women, both generationally and individually. Their considerations as a whole were summarised by journalist Milica Milojević-Kosić and literary critic Nađa Bobičić in a podcast about Elena Ferrante and her Neapolitan Novels: “Even when we are broken by structures, women aren’t just passive objects upon whom injustices are done, but rather they fight against them all the time. This is particularly accentuated by Elena Ferrante when speaking from an unprivileged perspective: the possibility of resistance always exists, because without it we ultimately wouldn’t be able to survive.”
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