The Museum of Unconditional Surrender - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0753807351 ISBN 13: 9780753807354

Publisher: Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )

Synopsis

This is a deeply East European novel in flavour reminiscent of Kundera and Borges. Through weaving together fragments, stories, and diaries Dubravka Ugresic, a prize-winning novelist in the former Yugoslavia, captures the world of a group of characters living in Berlin and Lisbon. Ugresic convincingly brings to life a world and characters preoccupied by questions of exile, nationalism, angels, parables, the Berlin zoo, the layers of meaning in one's past and future frozen by the camera. Underpinned by a calm note of tragedy. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is a beautifully written novel, both bitter and funny in tone.

About this title

About the Author

Dubravka Ugresic is the author of several works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender and Fording the Stream of Consciousness, and three collections of essays, Have a Nice Day, The Culture of Lies, and most recently Thank You for Not Reading. She has received several international prizes for her writing, including the Swiss Charles Veillon European Essay Prize, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, and most recently the Premio Feronio-Citta di Fiano. Born and raised in the former Yugoslavia, she left her homeland in 1993 for political reasons and currently lives in Amsterdam.

From Publishers Weekly

Ugresic has designed this fragmented narrative of war-ravaged contemporary Eastern Europe carefully, so that her portrait of the stalwart but traumatized citizens, offered as a series of closeups, is not entirely available until the very last piece has fallen into place. The bulk of the book's narratives describe the lives of characters in various socioeconomic cubbyholes in major Central and Eastern European cities such as Berlin and Moscow; these translucent and occasionally magic-realist stories of transformation illustrate the repercussions of change within the private sphere convincingly and sometimes whimsically. In one episode, four young women playing cards are visited by a man claiming to be an angel. He gives a small feather to three of the four; upon swallowing the feather, these woman find that their lives are changed. In a pair of linked narratives, an elderly mother wonders about her middle-aged daughter, living far away from her; the daughter, in turn, imagines her mother's immigration from Bulgaria to Yugoslavia in 1946. Ugresic balances close observation of private moments with prescient (if seemingly randomly offered) sociological and historical insights, peppering the book with eye-catching quotes by Shklovsky, Nabokov and others that help to describe how the independent existences of city dwellers might reflect the lives of entire countries. Ugresic pries deeply into the lives of her subjects, using many personal and luminous details to make this muralistic work all the more affecting. As the book progresses, images repeat and harmonize across narrative boundaries to create a grim but uplifting picture.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Phoenix (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )
• ISBN 10: 0753807351
• ISBN 13: 9780753807354
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English