Items related to Have a Nice Day
Synopsis
Dubravka Ugresic is Croatia's finest living writer. Escaping from a dreadful situation in Zagreb, she finds herself living in Middletown, Conneticut. There she compiles a witty, sardonic dictionary of everyday American life shot through with absurdity and her awareness of the barbaric realities of Sarajevo and Dubrovnik. Diary, autobiography, travel book and fiction: this is a strange and lovely book. Like Waugh or Nabokov, the author registers American life in a deadly deadpan voice. Jogging. Shrinks. Personal Organizers. Growth. Have a Nice Day. Couch Potato. The Body Beautiful.
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Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Serbo-Croation
From Publishers Weekly
Croatian novelist and journalist Ugresic's quirky, razor-sharp essays comprise a wry look at American life and a jolting, sensitive self-portrait in cultural dislocation. Fleeing wartorn Zagreb in late 1991, she went to Amsterdam, then spent most of 1992 in New York City and teaching at Wesleyan in Connecticut. Americans, in her view, constantly "network," redesign their self-images and compulsively organize their lives, jobs and leisure. She writes that Americans aggressively work at being happy, imitating the synthetic images shown on films and television and in ads. Through a conversation, real or imagined, with her bleached-blonde psychiatrist, Ugresic deflates Western stereotypes of Balkan peoples' "mythic, tribal thinking." Elsewhere she charges that Serbian and Croatian nationalists use patriotic and religious symbols, slogans and kitsch to seduce the masses. Ugresic, who now lives in Berlin, wrote these pieces as columns for an Amsterdam newspaper; though they vary considerably in quality, her nervous, precise prose is a pleasure to read.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherPenguin Group USA
- ISBN 10 0140244840
- ISBN 13 9780140244847
- BindingPaperback
- Rating
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