Baba Yaga Laid an Egg [Paperback]

Dubravka Ugresic (Author), Ellen Elias-Bursac (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 11, 2011

According to Slavic myth, Baba Yaga is a witch who lives in a house built on chicken legs and kidnaps small children. In Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, internationally acclaimed writer Dubravka Ugresic takes the timeless legend and spins it into a fresh and distinctly modern tale of femininity, aging, identity, and love.

With barbed wisdom and razor-sharp wit, Ugresic weaves together the stories of four women in contemporary Eastern Europe: a writer who grants her dying mother’s final wish by traveling to her hometown in Bulgaria, an elderly woman who wakes up every day hoping to die, a buxom blonde hospital worker who’s given up on love, and a serial widow who harbors a secret talent for writing. Through the women’s fears and desires, and their struggles against invisibility, Ugresic presents a brilliantly postmodern retelling of an ancient myth that is infused with humanity and the joy of storytelling.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ugresic's postmodern take on myth, femininity, and aging provides a beautifully written window into Slavic literature, but eventually becomes bogged down in competing narrative threads. The tangentially related sections of the narrative triptych, while uneven as a whole, provide lovely moments in each. In the first, more melancholy section, the narrator recounts her mother's encroaching Alzheimer's while fulfilling her last wishes and remembering the tenets she lived by (old age is a terrible calamity; beans are best in salad). In the second, most humorous, and oblique section, three old friends let their hair down at a high-end resort, replete with a charming, young faux-Turkish masseur; and in the third, a scholar provides background on Baba Yaga myths (Baba Yaga is the witch of Slavic fairy tales). Ugresic's meditations on the attempts of aging women to avoid becoming either short-haired desexualized hags or dotty creatures surrounded by cats are worth the overly esoteric tone that keeps the characters from becoming entirely engrossing. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Acclaimed Croatian writer Ugresic crafts three modern variations on the Baba Yaga legend, the witchlike character found in Slavic folklore. In the first tale, a Croatian writer makes a pilgrimage to Varna behalf of her elderly mother, hoping to act as a surrogate to renew her mother’s declining memory. The outcome, however, does not provide the emotional relief that she or her mother expected. In the second version, three elderly women visit a Czech Republic resort turned wellness center. Kukla and Beba often look after the oldest in the group, the perpetually cranky Pupa, as they try out the center’s varied offerings. What seems to be an uneventful trip soon evolves into a series of unexpected turns and revelations. The final story is told in essay form by the anagrammatic Dr. Aba Bagay, a folklorist who not only offers her detailed explanation of the Baba Yaga myth but also analyzes the previous tales and allusions. Ugresic’s multilayered narratives come together as an exploration of femininity, identity, mortality, and folklore’s wondrous powers. --Leah Strauss --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; Tra Rep edition (January 11, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802145205
• ISBN-13: 978-0802145208
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,045,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars The Old Witch! April 26, 2010

By Larissa

Format:Hardcover

Once you notice them, old women are everywhere...

And so too are the starlings to my mothers great dismay. The noise is bad enough, but the mess they make would drive my mother crazy. She could not stand anything unclean or untidy in her home. But cleanliness was not her only battle, she was losing her words and becoming mixed up from Alzheimer's.

At the Grand Hotel three old women are checking in, how long they stay is up to fate. The oldest is confined to a wheelchair, wearing a single large boot with both legs tucked inside. The next is an exceptionally tall woman who seems to always carry a breeze about her; she also carries a string of dead husbands behind her. The last is a short grey haired woman with big bosoms and an equally big heart.

But what has any of this to do with Baba Yaga, a witch who flies about in a mortar, all but blind with only her great sense of smell to lead her as she moves about the world for good deeds or ill, making mischief at her will. As a woman of great power, Baba Yaga has the ability to alter her size or her shape, often taking the form of a bird. And isn't it birds who lay eggs...

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg is an utterly unique story retelling the myth of Baba Yaga in a distinctive style that is free of traditional form. The story of Baba Yaga is a story of women; mothers, daughters and lovers.

Traditionally Baba Yaga is an old woman so it is no surprise that the leading characters here are themselves old woman. But it is not just ageing that is central to the issues in this book but also femininity and identity that is questioned. A story recommended only for those who are willing to put in the effort to get to know this old and startling witch known as Baba Yaga.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A read that shouldn't be overlooked May 13, 2010

By Midwest Book Review

Format:Hardcover

There is much to be drawn from the story of a resourceful witch. "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg" is a collection of short stories from Dubravka Ugresic, as she tells the tales of four modern Eastern European women as they make their way through the world, using the Slavic myth of Baba Yaga as the foundation for these tales. An original blend of mythology and modern fiction, "Baba Yaga Laid an Egg" is a read that shouldn't be overlooked.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Baba Yagas of the World, Unite! May 3, 2012

By Sofia Samatar

Format:Hardcover

"If there was something I could not abide, it was folklore and the people who studied folklore."

So declares the narrator of the first section of Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, Dubravka Ugresic's tough and witty novel on the theme of the famous witch. This narrator has traveled from Zagreb to Varna, her ageing mother's home town, and is supposed to bring home pictures. She's depressed by the city, which she knew as a teenager before the war but can no longer recognize, and by an annoying friend of her mother's who won't leave her alone--a young woman who's just received her PhD in folklore. Fairytales, the narrator believes, miss the point: domestic folklorists are "generally closet nationalists," while foreign ones exploit war zones, enthusiastically studying the "new" folklore of hatred. The victims of that hatred are "of little interest to anyone."

The narrator of this first part of the three-part novel is prickly, impatient, caustic--and right. There is something syrupy about the study of folklore. The brilliance of the novel lies in the way it rescues Baba Yaga from the syrup. Ugresic explores Baba Yaga's intractability, foulness and grandeur, uncovers her divine origins, refigures her as a radical "dissident," and above all makes her speak for those "of little interest to anyone"--old women.

Although there is overlap between them, each of the three sections of the book has its own flavor and set of preoccupations (and, in a genius move, its own translator). Part One stars our no-nonsense narrator and her wonderful, exasperating mother, who suffers from mild dementia. Part Two has a lighter tone, and is set at a hotel where three old women, including the mother from Part One, have gone for a holiday.... This section reads most like a fairytale, featuring a casino windfall, a melancholy masseur with a perpetual erection, a grandchild who pops up as suddenly as Thumbelina, and a death by golf ball. Despite its exuberance, this section resists becoming sentimental or cute; it's here, where female old age is seen through the eyes of elderly women, that the humor is at its most lacerating. Here's Beba, the mother from Part One, on the subject:

"On the other hand, what is left for women when they stumble into old age? One rarely sees those few fortunate ones with übermensch genes, such as that crone of Hitler's, Leni Riefenstahl, who lived to be a hundred and one, and showed everyone the meaning of 'the triumph of the will'!... [M]ost are left with the 'old-lady in good-health look.' These are desexualised old hags with short, masculine haircuts, dressed in light-coloured windcheaters and pants, not differentiated in any way from their male contemporaries, and noticed only when they are in a group."

Part Three, written by the folklorist from Part One, is a delicious catalog of Baba Yaga lore, which many people on Amazon and Goodreads seem to find irritating and/or dull. I SO DISAGREE. Ok, it's a bit arch at times (those references to "your author," who is the author of the first two parts of the book, who may be Ugresic or another character, nudge-wink-pomo-shenanigans), but it's also packed with mystery, dazzling and terrifying images, brutal history, enticing snippets of stories, and a vibrant feminist politics. For me, it's an essential part of the novel. Like the three old women, Beba, Pupa and Kukla, the three sections of this book need each other.

Baba Yagas of the World, Unite! Read more ›

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Chaotic September 26, 2010

By Koho

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Maybe I just don't understand this book. It is a two part novella, then the last third of the book is random, contradictory notes on the mythology of Baba Yaga. They don't fit. Every older woman can't be Baba Yaga

7 of 11 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Baba Yaga Laid An Egg May 23, 2010

By Miriam Sagan

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Baba Yaga Laid An Egg by Dubravka Ugresic

"In the absence of all ideologies, the only refuge that remains for the human imagination is the body."

This book was recommended to me because of course I love (and fear) Baba Yaga. It is part of series in which authors were asked to write based on an ancient myth. This is a post modernist deconstruction of the Slavic witch, by turns amusing, irritating, confusing, and illuminating. As the book says "...while Baba Yaga may not be Oprah Winfrey or Princess Dina, she isn't a completely obscure mythical nonentity either."
I don't know how Baba Yaga came into my childhood. No doubt through books of Russian fairy tales, and the realization that my grandparents were Russian, if Jews (all the more reason to fear her oven.)
This novel is set after the civil wars in the Balkans, after the collapse of the Soviets, after the break up of Yugoslavia. An author takes care of her dying mother and fulfills her wish to travel to Bulgaria, a young graduate student type dogs her steps, a tale within a tale presents three very old women at a spa/casino, and at the end there is a fake/real critical look at all the stories, plus a huge overview of Baba Yaga in numerous mythologies. It is perhaps a bit much, self-conscious, but actually quite satisfying.
It isn't easy to meet a witch and live to tell the tale.

For reviews by Miriam Sagan visit Miriam's Well [...]