Product Description

Tanja Lucic teaches at the University of Amsterdam and lives on the edge of the city's red light district. She and her pupils, fleeing the violent break-up of their homeland Yugoslavia, have found temporary refuge in the Department of Slavonic Languages. Desperate to make ends meet, many of the students find work at the 'Ministry', a fetish-wear factory in North Amsterdam. Meanwhile, Tanja and her student Igor form a dangerously close relationship that threatens to unleash all the tensions of life in exile. With her sharp and melancholy observations, Dubravka Ugresic illuminates with savage compassion our shared human homelessness.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #381083 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-11
• Original language: Croatian
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Review
'One of the ten greatest writers you've never heard of.' Guardian'A disturbing read that should have you in its thrall.'The Times'Ugresic builds her palace of art out of the blood-soaked debris of politics.' Boyd Tonkin, Independent'This edgy, extraordinary novel ... vividly exposes the isolation, fear and confusion of enforced exile.' Joan Smith, The Sunday Times'Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.' The Washington Post

The Independent
‘Ugresic’s books contain some of the most profound reflections on culture, memory and madness you will ever read.’

The Washington Post
‘Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.’

Customer Reviews

The Pain of Exile
The book is divided into five parts. I found the first part absolutely brilliant, and I think it deserves a five star rating. The narrator, Tanja Lucic, is a Croatian academic who has exiled herself from the former Yugoslavia and has taken a post as a lecturer on Serbo-Croatian literature at the University of Amsterdam. Her students, too, are for the most part, exiles from the various republics that made up the former Yugoslavia. They had enrolled in the course primarily because it was easier to stay legally in Holland as foreign students than to be allowed to stay as refugees. Tanja and the students are all traumatized by the war in Yugoslavia. Tanja's intention in the course is to preserve the memory of life in Yugoslavia before the break-up and, above all, to preserve the memory of Yugoslav literature when back at home the Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Macedonians and Albanians were repudiating their common heritage, and, as far as they could, even the heritage of a common language. But this intention, so far from that being any kind of a healing procedure, created many tensions in the group: its members could not forget what suffering had been inflicted on them by members of other ethnic groups. The displaced and rootless members of the group, uncertain now of their identity, suffer from a kind of sado-masochism: the title of the book is taken from the name of a sado-masochistic club in The Hague. There is a horrifying climax in Part Four when Tanja is victimized by a student who attacks everything she had been trying to do.

Long before that episode, Tanja had come to realize that the Titoist Yugoslavia which preceded the break-up had its own 'Problematik': so could it really be held up as a pre-lapsarian ideal?

This is a rather crude summary of Ugresic's subtle exploration of what memories mean and what they can do to this particular group of exiles. The book must be even more resonant to readers who are familiar with Serbo-Croat literature, fairy tales and nursery rhymes.

Actually, Tanja is unqualified to act as a kind of therapist to the group also because she herself is slowly disintegrating. The remaining four sections of the book describe this process of disorientation. She is full of neuroses, of inarticulate anxiety and of inarticulate rage. I found those parts much more difficult to read, to sympathize with and probably to understand; and that has affected my overall rating of the book. Part One had dealt problems which I imagine all Yugoslav exiles shared; the rest of the book - and particularly the generalized hymn of hate with which it ends - does not seem to me to have that universal character.

A tribute is due to Michael Henry Heim, who has translated the work from the original Croat.

Resonance for all exiles
This is a marvellously written book which should resonate with all exiles, wherever they come from and wherever they've fled to. As an exile myself, also living in Amsterdam, with an intimate connection with the ex-Yugoslav community here and even having a passing acquaintance with the workshop which gives the book its title, I can fully empathise with the author's characters and their messages.

The book starts sturdily founded in reality, and starts to break up somewhat as the characters themselves do. The translation of the quintessentially Yugoslav first section is necessarily a little awkward, but the rest has been brilliantly done (apart, unfortunately, from errors in some of the Dutch): the chapter describing an immigrant ghetto, which could be in any Western city, deserves a prize of itself.

I'm looking forward to reading more of Ugresic' work.

Excellent
This is a wonderful absorbing book.
The central character is captivating.
Although her exile is from what was Yugoslavia, it is a universal story for all exiles/immigrants.