Review: Ministry of Pain

I love Dubravka Ugresic. She is an author. A 'croatian' political exile. An unashamed Yugonostagic. Her writing really resonates with me. She acts as a window to the 'croatian' culture & history that i myself have become distanced from. She posseses a reflective nature, seeing well beyond the situaltion at hand. But perhaps most compelling is her willingness to believe in both the posibility of a better world & the tarnished nature of the subject.

The book is first & foremost about the experience of being a refugee. It is of the aftermath of war. Memory & Identity. It covers work she has previously written about in essays, but this she does so with fiction. Through the lectures held by Tanya to her slavic refugee students at a university in Amstedam. All have excaped the war in 'former yugoslavia'. Yet can even these lucky ones truly avoid the scars of the war?

The book starts off slow, emotionless. Shell shocked. Yet as as the plot advances so does emerge little bits of sadness. And then pain. And soon enough all the other elements of anger & absurdity that come with war emerge. Things transform. Pearl earings become the mirror to the soul. Shopping bags become time bombs. Comfort objects begin to cut. Memory is a lethal shrapnel for those who have escaped.

For Ugresic, who believes that 'language is just dialect with the backing of an army' it is important for her to be critical of notions of right & wrong. Of what is proper & improper. She is wary of creating her own army. Of erecting her own proper language, at the cost of dialectical [sic] play. She avoids the certianty that is to war. Her work, wirten in short chapters, with a story that turns in on itself, always reflecting, & without complete resolve, captures a land of dialects. A world of typos, mistakes & character flaws that make sense only in the moment.

A deep statement on memory, war, nation & identity. Perhaps not her best work & it can be dry, with little humor, but still full of insight & personal truth.