Collections
Genres
Publication
Ecco (2007), Edition: Reprint, 272 pages
Description
Having fled the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucic is now a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches a class filled with other young Yugoslav exiles, most of whom earn meager wages assembling leather and rubber S&M clothing at a sweatshop they call the "Ministry." Abandoning literature, Tanja encourages her students to indulge their "Yugonostalgia" in essays about their personal experiences during their homeland's cultural and physical disintegration. But Tanja's act of academic rebellion incites the rage of one renegade member of her class--and pulls her dangerously close to another--which, in turn, exacerbates the tensions of a life in exile that has now begun to spiral seriously out of control.
Media reviews
It’s as if the very structure of the novel is asking, "What do individual relationships matter in the face of disaster?” Characters are introduced and then disappear. With apparently small provocation, central characters move from a flirtatious friendship into attempts to do each other real
Show More
harm. In the epilogue, though, they’re domestic partners, with only a brief summary to hint at whatever emotional transitions happened offstage. Show Less
Above all, Ugresic maps our ability to survive and to tell the stories of our survival, even when scarred and deprived by war and banishment of those myths we once claimed as signifiers of our identity.
But despite the breadth and depth of its political and literary ambitions, The Ministry of Pain is possessed of a wonderful, clear simplicity. There are very pure pleasures in Ugresic's honesty, her lightsome, moving prose, her ability to dance in a flash from outrage to satire to a heartfelt
Show More
exposition of beauty. Show Less
Awards
Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (Shortlist — 2006)
San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year (Fiction — 2006)
Language
Physical description
272 p.; 8 inches
ISBN
0060825855 / 9780060825850