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By Dubravka Ugrešić

Book Overview

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."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0811214931
• ISBN13: 9780811214933
• Release Date: February 2002
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 4.9" x 7.8"

Customer Reviews

History of a sickness

Umberto Eco once said (in his book called The name of the rose):"Only thing that makes a man different than the animal is his ability to laugh" Different author (which doesen't have anything to do with the literature, at least not in the one they call clasic), once said:"There is only one kind of sickness that only humans can suffer from, and it is called - nostalgia."And this is the book, about it. This is the book, about the feeling you get when you lie at your bed late at night, thinking about all the places and person you have visited and got to know and like, this is the book about irreversibility of the time, and book about stupid mass making stupid mistakes.Wraped in a form where exile is the main focus, with added retrospective of the war which held place on Balcan in the 90's, told with beautiful language skill (I read the book in the original language, wasn't to difficul considering that I'm native speaker of it :), so I cannot judge the quality of translation,) this book is a masterpiece.Four stars because fourth part of the book is really bad when compared to rest, with flat prosaic skills, and simple sentences.

Pretentious? Look who's talking.

I have become skillful at avoiding books written on the topic of my former homeland and its vicissitudes. After 10 years of exile and statelessness, a refugee is supposed to have grown a thick skin... Ugresic gets me. I cry and I shiver when I read her. I feel as if going through a dark tunnel while holding somebody's hand. However, I don't know (and I don't want to know)if a person with a permanent citizenship and a stable state of mind would like it.

Sensitive and Moving Picture of Exile

This book deserves high marks -- well written, well translated, it gives an unusual and sensitive picture of the life of an exile from the former Yugoslavia. But exiles are not always displaced people: they can be elderly, alone, disoriented, misunderstood -- all prey to an inner exile. Ms. Ugresic's intriguing juxtaposition of stories shows the many different ways in which people construct their own biographies or those of others, but ultimately share many of the same emotions and insoluble problems. There are a lot of wise and touching observations in this "collection" of pieces which ultimately form a moving and poetic whole.