The Brooklyn Rail

Croatia, on the map, suggests a wrung-out rag. Its largest clump sits up north, crowning the Balkan peninsula, and there you find the capital, Zagreb, but to the east the country gets knotted and squeezed, till it’s no more than a dripping tail along the Adriatic. The shape might be called tormented⎯ and wasn’t the nation born of torment? In the early 1990s, the Yugoslav Wars? The madness engulfed Croats, Serbs, and others, goaded by greedy thugs into reclaiming their “sacred homeland.” The death toll climbed to over 140,000, and collateral damage included not just churches and libraries, but the humanities itself. “In just three years of war,” claims the late Dubravka Ugrešić, in The Culture of Lies, her newly reissued text on the conflict, “literature [was] destroyed.” The same fate awaited any artistic effort that didn’t flatter the nationalist mafia, and as for Ugrešić—born and raised in Zagreb—in ’93 she fled, becoming another of those she calls “Yugoslav gypsies.”

More’s the tragedy, her writing had just hit its stride. In 1988, before she turned forty, Ugrešić was the first woman winner of Yugoslavia’s foremost literary award. But once the wars erupted, the bloody-minded new Croatia banned her books and branded her a “witch.” In response, the author turned avenging angel: Culture of Lies expands, in thunder, on the title’s condemnation, and the book appeared just two years after she’d become a refugee. By then she was based in Amsterdam, and the first publication was in Dutch (the first American edition came in ’98), but most of its chilling contents, twenty-one long essays in the update, had seen print across Europe. No doubt this prolixity was fired in part by the need for a paycheck, but its essential spark was outrage, and the book established the woman as a public intellectual on the world stage.

Over the following decades, working wherever they’d have her (a Harvard Bunting Fellowship came through at a key moment), Ugrešić produced a good dozen more titles. She’s not above poking fun at her position, “selling [her] misfortune like street attractions,” but the quality of those attractions never flagged. The ’97 novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender outdid her earlier fiction and took home a major European award. The non-fiction proved just as sharp, as venturesome, when on other subjects, as in American Fictionary, and she has another such text coming, A Muzzle for Witches, in the fall. But that one came together while she was ravaged by cancer. In March of 2023, she opted for euthanasia.

A career defined by a schism, by exile, may recall Dante. But Ugrešić was very much a contemporary sensibility, and she gave her broken world a postmodern spin. The work tells many stories, the non-fiction too, but Ugrešić serves these in fragments, tossing in intertextual games and self-referential speculations. She rejects standard development in order to represent a refugee’s truth, and so asserts her place in a swelling movement, here at the century’s quarter-mark: an aesthetic of the unsettled and experimental. Not every writer working this vein is part of some diaspora, but they all suffer the same tremors underfoot, an instability that leaves them unsuited for ordinary narrative constructs.

Such an approach proved especially congenial in the novel that introduced me to Ugrešić, Fox (2018). The text interpolated bitter samples of her former life with stories of Russian modernists doomed to worse: victims of Stalin. In and among those, sinuous as a fox, darted episodes of romance, whole-cloth invention. Overall, the novel seems to me the equal of the more celebrated Museum of Unconditional Surrender. The two fictions make companion texts, risky imaginative leaps that prove richly rewarding⎯ moreso, I’d say, than the Holocaust-obsessed narratives of the author’s countrywoman, Daša Drndić (Trieste and others; died 2018). Ugrešić renders her horrors as madcap collage, suggesting a witch’s recipe, a protective spell. In Museum, when a girls’ night out in wartime Zagreb is visited by an angel, the creature pulls a Houdini, vanishing. On top of that, next morning, only one of the girls remembers him; only she can tell the story of escape from a troubled land.

Then there’s the excitement Ugrešić generates at the level of phrase and sentence. In the reissued Culture of Lies, her purpose couldn’t be more transparent, she’s bearing witness, but she makes an important distinction in her introduction (unchanged from the first English version): “My texts do not speak of the war itself, they are rather concerned with life on its edge.” Her essays after all are part of her larger project, bewitching the forces of oppression⎯ and the image is hers, I should say, not mine; it concludes the book, in a “Glossary” entry under “Witches.” Therefore, Culture eschews battle scenes or political analysis, instead picking through the detritus of the internecine strife. It’s especially alert to word on the street, as certain vocabulary turns dangerous, and how this threat carries over to much else, from shop window displays to TV viewing. She misses none of the contortions of a former “Yugo:”

History has got mixed up with his private life … it has caused him to perform “triple axles,” he was born in one country, lived in another, died in a third; it has caused him to change his identity like shirts, it has given him a feline elasticity.

From the skating rink to the shirt closet to a cat’s nine lives: Ugrešić feels out one analogy after another, grappling for purchase amid the sliding panels of her reality. The sensuality of her rhetoric, in fact, is the first thing mentioned in this edition’s afterword, by the scholar Mark Thompson: “Open your ears to her prose; taste it….” This gift, paired with her close and thoughtful observations, results in a motherload of passages like the one I just cited, a few lines that encapsulate her whole purpose: “The Pakistani standing in the place where [the Berlin Wall] stood … selling cheap souvenirs of a vanished epoch is perhaps the most precise and condensed metaphor of the times….” Better yet, such apercus come across powerfully no matter how their elements shift to suit the occasion. Their flexibility speaks volumes for Celia Hawkesworth’s translation; Ugrešić thanks her warmly, in a closing note.

To be sure, such a rich assortment of thought-pieces doesn’t easily yield a standout. If there’s a must-read, though, it’s the long central essay “Balkan Blues.” A meditation of more than fifteen sections, some a few pages and some a few lines, their connections associative rather than logical, “Blues” looks over Yugoslavia’s rich heritage of homegrown music. The regional soundtrack ranges from heroic tales sung over a single-string dulcimer to salacious and video-friendly Euro-pop. Yet the Wars have deformed all of it, some tunes treated like patriotic anthems and others like threats to the nation. The essay balances cool erudition (the single-string instrument, we learn, is a “gusle”) with zingers to the spine. The nastiest shocks are delivered by the passages on the newly-hatched regime’s old-school misogyny⎯for instance the singalong chorus “Punish me like a woman.”

Such ugly business depends enormously, Ugrešić asserts further, on a compliant media. Fake news, Yugo-style, prompts some of her most withering attacks. If her former neighbors have been reduced to “idiots of music,” and her former country to a rag, it’s largely due to “the media … legalizing lies.” So the updated Culture of Lies resonates most deeply and frightens us worst. Thirty years after its original publication, US readers too have seen con men and their goon squads “justifying themselves by … national myths.”