Dubravka Ugrešić
Croatian
1949-
Search for works owned by Grinnell College here.
Official reaction to Dubravka Ugrešić's political commentary led her to leave her native Croatia in 1993 and take up a life of exile. In essays such as those collected in The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays, Ugrešić takes a candid look at Yugoslavia during the Communist era and its aftermath. She critiques the country's culture and questions whether very much has changed since the fall of communism. In her view, Yugoslavian lives were and still are founded on sexism, political brainwashing, and lies. The essays in The Culture of Lies "will enrage and sadden you and then fill you with disgust toward narrow-minded nationalism," advises Mirela Roncevic in Library Journal. "Ugrešić defends her viewpoint skillfully and confidently."
In Have a Nice Day: From Balkan War to the American Dream Ugrešić describes her flight from Croatia and her subsequent wanderings. Described by a Booklist contributor as "[p]art diary, part vignette, part frantic journal entry, part vocabulary for the country-less," Have a Nice Day provides a portrait of Americans as compulsively busy people in aggressive pursuit of happiness, charges Croatian and Serbian nationalists as using religious and patriotic symbols for their own ends, and reflects on the pleasure and sorrow of escaping the horrors of her homeland. Commenting on Have a Nice Day, a Publishers Weekly reviewer declared that the author's "nervous, precise prose is a pleasure to read.'"(Contemporary Authors).
For more information check out the display in Burling, or visit her page at Literary Resource Center online...
Related Authors:
Danilo Kiš (1935-1989)
Slavenka Drakulić (1949-)
Miroslav Krleža (1893-1981)
Ivo Andrić (1892-1975)
