The Museum of Unconditional Surrender - Softcover

Ugresic, Dubravka

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811214931 ISBN 13: 9780811214933

Publisher: New Directions, 2002

Synopsis

Critically acclaimed experimental, literary fiction by the famous Croatian exile author.

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender―by the renowned Yugoslavian writer Dubravka Ugresic―begins in the Berlin Zoo, with the contents of Roland the Walrus's stomach displayed beside his pool (Roland died in August, 1961). These objects―a cigarette lighter, lollipop sticks, a beer-bottle opener, etc.―like the fictional pieces of the novel itself, are seemingly random at first, but eventually coalesce, meaningfully and poetically.

Written in a variety of literary forms, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender captures the shattered world of a life in exile. Some chapters re-create the daily journal of the narrator's lonely and alienated mother, who shops at the improvised flea-markets in town and longs for her children; another is a dream-like narrative in which a circle of women friends are visited by an angel. There are reflections and accounts of the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Civil War; portraits of European artists; a recipe for Caraway Soup; a moving story of a romantic encounter the narrator has in Lisbon; descriptions of family photographs; memories of the small town in which Ugresic was raised.

Addressing the themes of art and history, aging and loss, The Museum is a haunting and an extremely original novel. In the words of the Times Literary Supplement, "it is vivid in its denunciation of destructive forces and in its evocation of what is at stake."

About this title

About the Authors

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.

Celia Hawkesworth was Senior Lecturer in Serbian and Croatian at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College, London until her retirement. She has published numerous articles and several books on Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian literature, including a study Ivo Andric: Bridge between East and West, and Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia. She has also published numerous translations, including several works by Ivo Andric and Dubravka Ugresic.

Reviews

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: New Directions
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811214931
• ISBN 13: 9780811214933
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256