Exit into History: A Journey Through the New Eastern Europe - Softcover

Hoffman, Eva

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140145494 ISBN 13: 9780140145496

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1994

Synopsis

In this arresting, intimate narrative journey, award-winning Eva Hoffman returns to her Polish homeland and five other countries—Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and the two nations of the former Czechoslovakia—historically transformed by the demise of Communism. The result is the penetrating personal odyssey across the “other Europe” and a vivid portrayal of a landscape in the midst of change. Hoffman combines the wise perspective of an outsider and the passionate concern of a native daughter to illuminate the forces informing the region’s complex politics as she captures the texture of everyday life in a world in flux.
 
“Indispensable for anyone who wants to seriously come to grips with the experience of Eastern Europe.”—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
 
“Complex and full of the unexpected . . . Hoffman earns our trust as an observer.”—Tina Rosenberg, New York Newsday
 
“Written with incredible literary talent and intellectual soundness . . . An indispensable clue for anyone who is keen to understand how the new Europe is emerging from the debris of the Cold War period.”—Ryszard Kapuscinski

About this title

About the Author:

Eva Hoffman was born in Krakow, Poland, and emigrated to America in her teens. She is the author of Lost in Translation, Exit Into History, Shtetl, The Secret, and After Such Knowledge. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award, and an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Hoffman lives in London.

From Kirkus Reviews:

In a superb successor to her impressive personal memoir, Lost in Translation (1988), Hoffman chronicles two trips taken a year apart to de-Sovietized East Europe--touring her native Poland, as well as Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. In each place, Hoffman talks to people (with the weight perhaps shifted inescapably to literati, political sophisticates, high achievers) and takes a remarkably humane measure of the confusions, hopes, and lavish soulfulness born of unsentimental realism that's Mitteleuropa's greatest resource. She reliably detects nuance because, in a sense, she expects to find it (``History is a process of double-ledger accounting''). Sociology never overtly jogs her focus, yet she avails herself of large, thoughtful revelations: ``It may be that just as tonality recurs in music and realism in painting, so the idea of liberalism recurs in politics--though each time in a different vein. Eastern European liberalism seems not so much born again as refined in the crucible of successive skepticisms. It has seen the dangers of fanaticism, dogmatism, and cynicism; the dangers of too much belief and none at all.'' The people she talks to seem to be master self-modulators: victims but not eternal victims, needy but never without humor, aware of nationhood the way no Western patriot quite manages to be. And the book's easily as good just as sheer travel-writing. Hoffman stays open to the physical gorgeousness of Prague, the high civilization of Budapest hotel baths, the odd survival of the Transylvanian Gypsy nonculture--and she falls in love with Bulgaria (for the Bulgarians' innate poise and lack of spiritual turmoil), just as poor Romania, plaything of a madman, seems the most cursed nation of all after the spasms of 1989. From each land Hoffman is able to generalize only when it seems called for, and to refrain from generalizing when the broad view might only obscure: a rare thing. A remarkable book. (One map) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0140145494
• ISBN 13: 9780140145496
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 432