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Terezia Mora. Selfsame Materie. Reinbek, Germany. Rowohlt. 1999. 254 pages. DM 32. ISBN 3-498-04471-o.
The eponymous lead story in Selfsame Materie begins with the sentence, "Don't tell anyone how it happened." It is a clever opening, creating curiosity and tension.
In her first published volume, Terezia Mora (b. 1971) writes about people who eke out a living in villages, in the vicinity of the Austrian-Hungarian border. Currently, Mora lives in Berlin and appears on European television, but her characters belong to the times when East and West were separated by barbed wire, watchtowers, and minefields. One would therefore assume that Mora's short stories would reflect the political and ideological issues of that tortured period. Far from it. The message is universal. Such figures...