Charles Simic
Ugresic is the philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of the many shattered lives the wars in former Yugoslavia produced.
Susan Sontag
[A] brilliant, enthralling spread of story-telling and high-velocity reflections....She is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished.
Washington Post
Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.
Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
This unconventional novel by Croatian writer Ugresic is a collection of fragments--short essays, journal entries, stories, factual items, descriptions of place--that combine to evoke the distinct "point of pain" experienced by a political exile. The book is divided into seven parts, four taking place in present-day Berlin, the unnamed Yugoslavian narrator's place of "temporary exile." The Berlin pieces consist of numbered sections, some only a few lines or a paragraph, which convey city facts ("Under the grassy surface of the hill pulsate 26 million cubic metres of rubble from the ruins of Berlin, collected and dragged here after the Second World War"); thoughts about exile; quotations about Berlin, exile and art; and descriptions of friends, many of whom are themselves artists whose works reflect themes of fragmentation and attempts to reclaim lost or scattered memories. Another series of fragments consists of six stories, some set in America, loosely connected by themes of rootlessness, memory, disorientation. "Part Six" of the novel is a tale about seven women friends in Zagreb who encounter a prophetic angel shortly before "the local apocalypse"; the angel allows only the narrator to remember the occasion and give testimony. Recurring images and themes--the photo album or the museum, for instance--draw together the "bits and pieces," while the domestic details--meals, meetings, shopping expeditions--keep the work anchored firmly in the realm of day-to-day existence. Complex, intelligent and challenging, this unusual novel is rendered impressively accessible by Ugresic's human, vulnerable voice. (Oct.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Publishers Weekly
Ugresic has designed this fragmented narrative of war-ravaged contemporary Eastern Europe carefully, so that her portrait of the stalwart but traumatized citizens, offered as a series of closeups, is not entirely available until the very last piece has fallen into place. The bulk of the book's narratives describe the lives of characters in various socioeconomic cubbyholes in major Central and Eastern European cities such as Berlin and Moscow; these translucent and occasionally magic-realist stories of transformation illustrate the repercussions of change within the private sphere convincingly and sometimes whimsically. In one episode, four young women playing cards are visited by a man claiming to be an angel. He gives a small feather to three of the four; upon swallowing the feather, these woman find that their lives are changed. In a pair of linked narratives, an elderly mother wonders about her middle-aged daughter, living far away from her; the daughter, in turn, imagines her mother's immigration from Bulgaria to Yugoslavia in 1946. Ugresic balances close observation of private moments with prescient (if seemingly randomly offered) sociological and historical insights, peppering the book with eye-catching quotes by Shklovsky, Nabokov and others that help to describe how the independent existences of city dwellers might reflect the lives of entire countries. Ugresic pries deeply into the lives of her subjects, using many personal and luminous details to make this muralistic work all the more affecting. As the book progresses, images repeat and harmonize across narrative boundaries to create a grim but uplifting picture. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
