Customer Reviews

The Ministry of Pain

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The book is divided into five parts. I found the first part absolutely brilliant, and I think it deserves a five star rating. The narrator, Tanja Lucic, is a Croatian academic who has exiled herself from the former Yugoslavia and has taken a post as a lecturer on Serbo-Croatian literature at the University of Amsterdam. Her students, too, are for the most part, exiles from the various republics that made up the former Yugoslavia. They had enrolled in the course primarily because it was easier to stay legally in Holland as foreign students than to be allowed to stay as refugees. Tanja and the students are all traumatized by the war in Yugoslavia. Tanja's intention in the course is to preserve the memory of life in Yugoslavia before the break-up and, above all, to preserve the memory of Yugoslav literature when back at home the Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Macedonians and Albanians were repudiating their common heritage, and, as far as they could, even the heritage of a common language. But this intention, so far from that being any kind of a healing procedure, created many tensions in the group: its members could not forget what suffering had been inflicted on them by members of other ethnic groups. The displaced and rootless members of the group, uncertain now of their identity, suffer from a kind of sado-masochism: the title of the book is taken from the name of a sado-masochistic club in The Hague. There is a horrifying climax in Part Four when Tanja is victimized by a student who attacks everything she had been trying to do.

Long before that episode, Tanja had come to realize that the Titoist Yugoslavia which preceded the break-up had its own `Problematik': so could it really be held up as a pre-lapsarian ideal?

This is a rather crude summary of Ugresic's subtle exploration of what memories mean and what they can do to this particular group of exiles. The book must be even more resonant to readers who are familiar with Serbo-Croat literature, fairy tales and nursery rhymes.

Actually, Tanja is unqualified to act as a kind of therapist to the group also because she herself is slowly disintegrating. The remaining four sections of the book describe this process of disorientation. She is full of neuroses, of inarticulate anxiety and of inarticulate rage. I found those parts much more difficult to read, to sympathize with and probably to understand; and that has affected my overall rating of the book. Part One had dealt with problems which I imagine all Yugoslav exiles shared; the rest of the book - and particularly the generalized hymn of hate with which it ends - does not seem to me to have that universal character.

A tribute is due to Michael Henry Heim, who has translated the work from the original Croat.

In a world rapidly filling with those taking refuge from political turmoil, there is a growing literature of the refugee experience. This novel (which seems more like a memoir it is so detailed in the specifics of finding asylum in another country) covers a year in the life of a young woman from Zagreb in Croatia, who has fetched up in Holland, with a university teaching job in the Slavic Languages department. Here she teaches mostly fellow emigres, from the former Yugoslavia.

The narrative device gives opportunity for an ongoing analysis of what it means to be from a country that after bloody civil war no longer exists. In Amsterdam, she mingles with other emigres, "our people" she calls them, who like her can remember growing up in a communist country, priding itself in an ethnic diversity that it no longer tolerates. What they experience, living in exile, is what they call "Yugonostalgia." Returning to Zagreb for a brief visit, she learns what all immigrants must discover, that time does not stand still for those who have stayed behind. Soon those who have left, even history itself, are forgotten in a kind of collective amnesia.

There is defeat for both those who leave and those who stay, she concludes. The only triumph is at the moment of departure itself, when what is intolerable is left behind and the hope of finding a true home somewhere else is not yet dashed. This is something of an academic novel, the fate of the heroine tied up in departmental politics. Given the literary interests of the main character, there are many allusions to European and American literature, film, and pop culture, while the book also draws heavily on a familiarity with Balkan writers. Ironic, darkly humorous, and thought provoking.

When one thinks of a modern day intellectual(s), Susan Sontag comes to mind. But even if one looks a further back, there is Simone de Bouvier, Gertrude Stein, Ayn Rand to mention a few. Every time I read Ugresic's books I think of a writer and modern day philosopher who is trying to make sense of what it truly means being an intellectual in exile. What makes it even more horrifying is being a writer from a small country that disappeared long ago in a country where one's native language, the fighting sword of any writer, begins to loose its luster.

In her latest nover, Ugresic writes of Tanja Lucic, university professor of slavic literature using unorthodox methods to reach out to her small audience of students in slavic department. Most of them are from former Yugoslavia and some have personal attachments to the country and its people. Her methods make her seemingly likable amongst her students until she starts digging too deep. By the end of the first semester, one of her students has committed suicide and another has filed a complaint to he department head about the lack of syllabus in her teaching course. The fact that all of her students have A's is not helping either and Tanja's method changes to a stern, disciplined teaching, it leaves her with only four students in the class during second semester.

Ugresic cuts to the core of the pain of being in exile, being cut off from friens and family, or being humiliated from lack of ability to speak the language in emigree's newly adopted country. Her book characters are playing music in public places for money, they work in Amsterdam's sex shops that produce wardrobe and equipment; her main character lives in the basement apartment of the red light district, alone, detached and utterly unhappy.

While Mr. Heim does wonderful job of translating the book, for any reader unfamilar with culture, it is unfortunate that footnotes are not availbale. I am convinced that footnotes would bring out deeper meaning for some of the characters and references mentioned in dialogs between many of the book characters. The ending feels rushed, which is unfortunate. Otherwise, I fidn this book to be a remarkable piece of wok about what it means to be immigrant, what is it that we call home and how immigrants and emigrees redefine themselves in the new world they find themselves in.

I generally like literary works more than I liked this. I just simply can't get on board with anything. The writing style is acceptable, but nothing happens in the first 60 pages to garner a readers interest at all. Perhaps if I were Eastern European, or had lived as a refuge this book might appeal to me more. I just find the characters non-descript, they come in large waves, leaving you unable to separate them. There has to be a story here, but I'm just not interested enough in the characters to continue.

From Mishima's "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" to Kafka to "Winesburg, Ohio," the themes of alienation and exile have pervaded world literature in the twentieth century so much as to almost become a cliché. The various political disintegrations in Europe of the 1980s and 1990s gave need to another wave of this type of literature, and is whence Dubravka Ugresic's wonderful novel "The Ministry of Pain" comes. Reading it, I was reminded a lot of Kundera's novels from the same time period, though Ugresic takes herself less seriously and is a much more successful ironist. While renovating an apartment she is taking in, the main character pops in a random video, and it just happens to be the film version of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."

The novel follows Tanja Lucic after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia from Zagreb to Amsterdam to take up a position teaching language, mostly to students who (like her) have left Yugoslavia and are now living in Amsterdam waiting for their papers. Living near the red light district, the name of the novel derives from the store where many of Tanja's students make ends meet constructing sex toys and other leather goods for sex-play. With a highly unorthodox approach to teaching, Tanja chooses to probe her students' "Yugonostalgia" - memories of family, language, belonging, friends, and anything else that struck them as important about a place that, technically speaking, no longer exists. Tanja figures that her students' experiences can provide an anodyne for the traumatic displacements their lives have been forced to take on. When an anonymous student reports her for not being academically rigorous enough, she is forced to engage in another teaching style (exiled from her old one?), leaving both her students and herself completely bewildered. But her teaching is really only one of the many parallel stories and musings that go on, taking the novel away from traditional, linear storytelling. Much of the novel takes place through interior monologue where she delivers poignant, sad, and sometimes witty remarks about the brokenness of language, modern culture, her thoughts about her students' writing, and even one of their suicides.

Unlike in times past when the enlightened citizen-philosopher was offered in literature as the non plus ultra in relation to the modern state, Ugresic suggests that it is the exile whose fragmentation, psychic and geographic, provides new ground for understanding the self through literature. As she puts it in "Thank You for Not Reading," "The exile, like it or not, tests the basic concepts around which everyone's life revolves: concepts of home, homeland, family, love, friendship, profession, personal biography. Having completed the long and arduous journey of battling with the bureaucracy of the country where he has ended up, having finally acquired papers, the exile forgets the secret knowledge he has acquired on his journey, in the name of life which must go on." After all, exile is just another form of homecoming.

(This comes from a blog-posted review of three books--the present book, Philip Marsden's The Bronski House: A Return to the Borderlands, and Nikolai's Fortune by Solveig Torvik.)

Dubravka Ugresic's edgy but deeply humane novel is superb at portraying the cost of separation from one's homeland, coupled with the aching confusion of seeing one's homeland become a battle of violently competing identities--the situation faced by every refugee from the civil wars of the former Yugoslavia. The language(s) spoken by the refugees among each other is a minefield of unintended and intended belligerence. The protagonist, Tanja, shepherds her Amsterdam university class of mostly expatriate students of Yugoslav literature, through the tides of conflicting emotions and pragmatic survival imperatives, even as she tries to cope with her own realities of financial woes, departmental politics, and the slippery legalities of refugee status. She thinks about the people she has abandoned, while others (first her lover, then one after another of her students) abandon her. Meanwhile, the concept of homeland becomes more nebulous and brittle, and her memories become unreliable.

I loved the author's descriptions of the conversations and preoccupations of exiles when they gather in their Amsterdam hangouts--the deep tissues of grievances, gossip, conventional wisdom, resignation, and "Yugonostalgia." Tanja and one of her students spend a day at the Hague to watch a war crimes trial, and see before their very eyes the poisonous pettiness, the cosmic smallness of the men who gained power by making nationalism lethal. For some, the cost was life itself; others find themselves, as in Marsden's true story, forced into psychic as well as physical displacement among uncomprehending strangers.

The Washington Post called Dubravka Ugresic's The Ministry of Pain "a shiningly weird novel...[it] almost reaches perfection."

Well, I don't know about the perfection nor the weird part, but The Ministry of Pain gives the reader something to think about. The author and the protagonist are both from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Protagonist Tanja Lucic winds up at the University of Amsterdam as a professor of literature teaching "Yugonostalgia" to a group of other Yugoslav exiles.

The novel is broken into five parts and none seem to find what I think of as structure. They are only connected by the characters and how they deal with their identities. The main focus is Lucic and her abilities to cope in a new environment.

The Ministry of Pain gets is title from the fact the Lucic's students work in S&M sweatshop that they call "the ministry"-but there is little mention of it in the book. In fact, the reader never sees the students working in it, and it is only identified in a few narratives paragraphs.

The Ministry of Pain made me feel a little on the stupid side. I'm not familiar with that part of the world and had to get an atlas to located the places Ugresic mentions over and over. That was hard for me. On the other hand, I wondered what it must be like for emigrants in the world, especially for the wave of immigrants who came to America. Of course, that seems to be by choice. However, what must it feel like to consciously obliterated your language, heritage, culture and everything that made you, say Italian, Jewish, German, Albanian, Hungarian, Russian, and forever on to be "American"?

I think that's that The Ministry of Pain does. It gives the reader a sense of what it must be like to have to fit in somewhere else when you don't want to and re-define your very existence. This is a heavy novel in what it poses to the reader. And I guess that's the plan. If the story doesn't entertain, then at least it creates thought.

Armchair Interviews agrees.

Too bad, because this could have been a five star novel.
This writer can write, no doubt about it--and she has things to say,
but the ending is so ridiculous and hard to accept (it seems as though
the writer was lost when coming to terms as to how to end her tale) that
it practically invalidates all that preceded it.

I mean, the wrap up is something like a cheap twist ending in a B-grade
noir/indie flick.

And this writer is too good to do something like that. I still can't believe
that she decided this was the best way to resolve her tale (even two
weeks after having finished reading her book.)

My association with Yugoslavia began in the mid-1970's and includes six years living there and traveling around it. From that perspective, this is an interesting, even gripping, book. In rich, moving, well-textured language (translation or original), Ugresic makes us feel the somewhat contradictory sense of loss experienced by all the nationalities comprised in the "former Yugoslavia." Contradictory, because those who don't have some experience of the area may not grasp what's been lost.

So, how does one rate a book like this? It's not commercial, and will never be a best-seller; it's deep, to some extent, but it would also be easy to dismiss it as pointless, self-indulgent navel-gazing. I think the rating, on these amazon pages, must be based on the universality of its appeal; Ugresic's memoir offers insights into the rootless emigrant experience generally, but overall, it will only resonate deeply with those who have some experience of the former Yugoslavia. Thus, a three.

...in that the latter part of this hugely potential-filled book really affected my overall 'star rating.' Although I don't think it's deserving of merely 3-stars...as some have suggested.

Regrettably, authors like Ugresic are highly underrated and misunderstood, for the most part, in the West. That's a pity. The real mastery in such a work comes across in later contemplations of the story, when you've long put a book like this one back down on your coffee table, and you're walking alone in the street when the marvel of it suddenly clobbers you like an anvil.

I wouldn't call MINISTRY a best-seller by any stretch. It's the sort of work which probes deeply into the issues of rended souls obliterated by war, tenuously holding onto a thread of life. The Ministry of Pain deals large with issues of national identity and the complications surrounding virulent nationalism -- such as the one smouldering in the Former Yugoslavia over the past decade and more. Ugresic masterfully details what it's like to be alive and functioning as part of a 'something' which exists merely in the *memories* of people.

For those of us who hail from nations with long-established historical track records, thumbing through the tragic accounts of these fictional former Yuga emigres is a lesson about never taking anything from granted. At least that was my initial reaction from my first pass of the book.

Bear in mind that I've only begun to contemplate Ugresic's words. I'm astute enough to realize that the brilliance of some of the things which have graced my eyes here will only begin to affect me much later down the line, when I've had a chance to compare hers to the other Yugoslavian titles in my stack.

Most positively, I've long wanted to be able to write like this.

FYI --> Absolutely nothing's in lost in the Croatian-to-English translation. The essence of what author Ugresic attempted to convey in the original, MINISTARSTVO BOLI, bolts off the page like scimitar blows.

Prepare to be astounded...