The Ministry of Pain

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.

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.

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.

...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. <br /> <br />Prepare to be astounded...

This is one of the best books I have read recently. Whilst exile and loss are unavoidable themes for writers from ex-Yougoslavia, this is a particularly compelling story largely due to its central character.She holds her breath and then can't any more. Read it!