Alerted to the death of notable Croatian author Dubravka Ugrešić (1949-2023) by a Tweet from Declan O'Driscoll, I remembered that her essay collection Nobody's Home was part of The First 25 book bundle that I bought from Open Letter Books, ages ago in 2014.

Born in Croatia in 1949 but eschewing nationalism, Dubravka Ugrešić was a writer, translator and literary scholar with a keen interest in Russian avant-garde culture. She began her award-winning writing career with screenplays and books for children, and translated forgotten and contemporary Russian writers into Croatian. She was best known in the former Yugoslavia for her fiction, novels and short stories, but in 1996 she went into exile in the Netherlands because she was anti-nationalism and anti-war. As her profile at Goodreads tells us:

In 1991, when the war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm anti-nationalistic stand and consequently an anti-war stand. She started to write critically about nationalism (both Croatian and Serbian), the stupidity and criminality of war, and soon became a target of the nationalistically charged media, officials, politicians, fellow writers and anonymous citizens. She was proclaimed a “traitor”, a “public enemy” and a “witch”, ostracized and exposed to harsh and persistent media harassment. She left Croatia in 1993.

In exile Ugrešić continued teaching and writing, including novels and books of essays of which Nobody's Home (Nikog nema doma) is one. Amongst other awards, she won the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2016. Her books are widely translated and translation enthusiasts at Book Twitter are devastated by her early death in Amsterdam at the age of 73.

I haven't read the whole collection, because Nobody's Home is a book for dipping into, but I've enjoyed some of those with the most arresting titles. I particularly enjoyed 'What Is European about European Literature?' with its droll parallels in the Eurovision song contest, and also her self-mockery in 'The Stendhal Syndrome' where she has a panic attack on the famous Gaudi staircase in Barcelona's Sagrada Familia.

What possessed me to go up it in the first place? How many steps are there left to go? Will I ever get down—or will I be stuck in the bell tower—looking through the narrow little window at a scrap of sky—forever? Ah Gaudi! I waited in line from early morning yesterday for the famous Casa Mila, '"La Pedrera," to open. Gaudi's roof, with those astonishing chimneys (espantabruixes) as if it anticipated the future invasion of camera-clicking tourists: no one can escape being caught in someone's picture. (p.199)

(Yes, *blush*, you can see my enthusiastic camera-clicking at these sites in the slide-show at my travel blog.)

I could also relate to her wry lamentation about visits to cities that can be reduced to the things I haven't seen. Unlike Ugrešić, I have seen the Sistine Chapel, but my plans have likewise been foiled by renovations, strikes, airline stuffups, inexperience at being a tourist, and just not having enough time to see, for example, Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper and the Milan cathedral, St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, Rodin's statue of Balzac in Paris, and anything in Greece because they were rioting when we were planning my Big Birthday trip in 2012 and so we went to Russia instead.

I am likewise glad that I did most of my travel not so much in the less democratic times when airfares were expensive and Ugrešić had the Louvre, Hermitage and Metropolitan to herself, but before the advent of the hordes ticking off their bucket lists with selfies to prove it and the monster cruise ships in Venice.

Because since then the cities, and with them the museums, have been occupied by consumers of cheap airfares: people resigned to every physical and mental humiliation; tourists with nerves of steel and astonishing physical endurance; human specimens outfitted for combat, armed with backpacks, cameras and bottled water; people waiting patiently in long lines, latter-day pilgrims who are paying penance for who knows what sins; hunters on the lookout for tourist relics and collectors amassing cheap souvenirs; people who have taken the metaphor of the world as a global village literally. (p.200-1)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2023/03/18/nobodys-home-2005-by-dubravka-ugresic-transl... ( )

Embedded within a rushing narrative is a short story with the same theme, presenting a fictional variation the protagonist is reading on the [fictional] story that comprises the novel. It works to have these two narratives interwoven, though the inset one is very short and its conventional form highlights the internal monologue stream of the larger narrative. One eventually gets used to this stream, but it all gets to have a redundant feeling, needing editing to focus the larger narrative.

The translation is invisible and the work poetic in its rush, in sharp contrast to the subject matter, which is painful and keeps piling up. The rating reflects the fact that it somehow doesn't all hang together in the way it might have. Nevertheless it was somehow satisfying to read, and will require further consideration over time.

This is a collection of essays from an author who considers herself to be a "nobody", and the collection is a treatise on what a nobody's home is like. Ugresic, from the former Yugoslavia writes intelligently, with healthy doses of humor, cynicism, and poignancy. I am left with a powerful feeling of sorrow. Sorrow for what? I am not entirely certain. Perhaps I feel sorrow for: exiles, locals, foreigners, people whose birthplace is now referred to starting with the word, "former". Major themes: exile, ethnic identity, cultural identity, being a foreigner, the new "transnational" literature.....and so much more. ( )

I really liked the book, Ugresic has a great sense of humor and is a penetrating observer.

My favorite essay in the book is a long one called “Amsterdam, Amsterdam.” The city is Ugresic’s adopted home. In this essay is a delightful section about the Dutch and their bicycles that both awed me and made me laugh. The Dutch have such a close relationship with their bicycles, she says, that she is “surprised the Dutch flag doesn’t have a bicycle on it,” and vexed by there not being a verse in the Dutch national anthem about the bicycle. She’s seen Amsterdammers carry people, TVs, bureaus and bookshelves on their bicycles. While she clearly admires them she is also annoyed with them. Apparently, the majority of cyclists do not follow traffic rules and if you are a pedestrian your chances of being run over by a bike are high, even if you are walking on the sidewalk. I have never been particularly interested in going to Amsterdam, but after this essay I think it would be fun to go if only to watch the cyclists.

One of the things I enjoyed about Ugresic is that she doesn’t hold anything back; she calls it as she sees it and makes no apologies. She is a writer who believes that pretending things didn’t happen or don’t exist is more dangerous than speaking out about it, even if you are vilified for it by your own government. In her author’s note at the end of the book she says that being judgmental has become a negative trait along with pessimism. We are supposed to be optimistic, politically correct, tolerant, things that in themselves aren’t necessarily bad, but taken too far can mask a myriad of wrongs far worse than being judgmental.

I think that is what I like about this book. Ugresic dares to bicker. And oh, how refreshing that is!

See also: http://somanybooksblog.com/2009/06/07/nobodys-home/ ( )

Another success from Open Letter, which looks like it's tapped into an endless stream of little-known (in America) and intriguing authors writing outside of English. Ugresic is a literary intellectual with highbrow credibility to burn, and she can trade ideas with the best of them, but this collection is most interesting for its smaller personal essays, feuilletons if you will, many of which touch on Ugresic's dislocation as an emigre whose country of origin is gone. Is she Serb or Yugoslav or just some kind of post-national pan-European ghost?