SOURCE: Ashworth, Andrea. “Realm of the Senses.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4713 (30 July 1993): 20.

In the following review, Ashworth examines the themes, content, and style of Marble Skin.

Slavenka Drakulič is a mapper of fraught and forbidden territories. Having chronicled the recent Eastern European crises in her essay collections, Balkan Express and How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, the Croatian writer has turned to fiction to explore the more intimate terrain of the female body. Her second novel, Marble Skin, marks her courageous foray into the literary no-man's-land of the sexual mother, a compelling figure of desire rather than maternal love. Crossing the frontiers of taboo, Drakulič plunges into the heart of incestuousness to expose the female psyche in its darkest and most fleshy aspects.

At the centre of the drama lies the marble mother, carved in erotic self-absorption and exposed to the gaze and the sticky fingers of...