I can see how this book is important. It appears to be mostly autobiographical and shares memories of a woman which coalesce around the Balkan War and exile from.

The writing style is befittingly fragmentary, and this has a disorienting effect on the reader as you encounter pieces from her mother’s diary, her own experiences of exile, reflections on memory, political treatises, photographs and the way they shape the past, stories of friends and acquaintances, descriptions of literary events, magic realism, vignettes of Berlin.

Although there is coherence, you never feel like you’ve got a grip on anything and, for me, this was an unsettling experience. While I appreciated that this is probably exactly what Ugresic was after, I came away wanting more of a documentary account. She certainly never intended that it would be something of that nature, I’m sure.

It’s a novel about how war displaces and leaves you feeling numb and alienated from everything and, for that, it’s an important book. I just about got there but it’s definitely a bit to philosophical for me. ( )

Ugrešić seems to have a gift for catching memorable names in transit and fixing them as titles for her novels, whilst they evaporate from the institutions she took them from almost before we know it. The S-M club "Ministry of Pain" in my home city seems to be long-gone (if it ever existed), whilst the museum in Berlin-Karlshorst that gave her the title for this novel was only actually called "Museum der bedingungslosen Kapitulation des faschistischen Deutschlands im Großen Vaterländischen Krieg" between 1986 and 1994, when the changing tide of history made it adopt the more prosaic title "Deutsch-Russiches Museum". (Between 1967 and 1986 it was simply the Museum of the Soviet armed forces in Germany.)

... And one more thing: the question as to whether this novel is autobiographical might at some hypothetical moment be of concern to the police, but not to the reader.

This book fixes on the idea of collage as an artistic medium for representing broken worlds, specifically in this case the experience of the break-up of Yugoslavia, the wars of the 1990s, and exile. Ugrešić gives us fragments of childhood memory, random objects, the quotations and anecdotes that form the detritus at the bottom of a literary scholar's mind, a diary kept by the narrator's mother, the haphazard accumulation of history in the city of Berlin, encounters with other exiles in Berlin and elsewhere, and all kinds of other bits and pieces, including, when we are least expecting it, a clear departure from the world of realistic representation. There is a lot of rubbish, lovingly picked through so that we can think about the history of why and how that item was discarded, and what might have happened to it before then, there is plenty of kitsch (snowglobes!), but there are also apparently serious reflections from major writers - in particular Isaac Babel, Joseph Brodsky and Miroslav Krleža - there is highly personal stuff mixed in with the most fleeting and impersonal encounters, there are fragments of narrative mixed in with passages that resist any attempt to make them into stories...

There are, as the author (or is it already the narrator?) has warned us in the preface, patterns and links that seem to impose some kind of structure, but we are urged not to worry too much about them: names and images and anecdotes come back in crazily different contexts in bafflingly similar forms. It does all seem to work, perhaps because Ugrešić is a narrator with the kind of authority we want to listen to, perhaps because the patterns in the material are so deep that they go straight to our subconscious - but it's a disturbing experience, as it's evidently meant to be. Even if you haven't lived through a collapse of the order and structure of your world on the scale that Yugoslavians experienced in the 90s, everyone who reads this will probably have had some kind of trauma (or near-miss) in their lives that this speaks to. ( )

“Rilke once said that the story of a shattered life can only be told in bits and pieces …” p107

The novel begins with a description of the contents of a stomach of a walrus which died in the Berlin zoo; unimaginable bits of random, plastic modern life, which, no matter how one may try to fit together, stay a random collection, but still describe the walrus's life and ultimately his death.

So it is with Ugrešić's novel. There are random bits and pieces which one is in despair of fitting together, and yet describe the refugee's life.

Beautifully written, but a tough book for me to get through; less because of the subject matter than the episodic, patchwork style. Perhaps this only reflects my lack of experience with postmodernism.

By the end I had a little clearer understanding of living with a life ripped away.

Ugrešić herself fled war torn Yugoslavia as it disintegrated into five separate nations. Her birthplace became part of Croatia and she writes in Croatian. ( )

Scattered stories and objects in parallel reflecting the shattering nature of exile resulting from war. ( )

28 Dec 2012 I read 50 pages and gave up for I simply wasn't interested in the story anymore.