Abstract
Concluding his review of The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Serbian critic Teofil Pancic stated that the novel ‘appears as the natural and highly successful completion of a particular “cycle”, as the conclusion of a dif- ficult and challenging chapter; a reckoning with the consequences and (epi)phenomena of the disintegration of the “world of yesterday”’.1 It must then have come as a surprise, and not just to Pancic, that Ugresic’s next novel, The Ministry of Pain, would actually be a companion piece to Museum, the second part of a diptych. If Museum was primarily a novel of museums and the technologies of memory, its chronotope dispersed throughout the ruins of the European twentieth century, The Ministry of Pain narrows its focus to post-1989 eastern Europe, and more directly, to the Atlantis of Yugoslavia. In contrast to the resigned and occasionally bittersweet tone of its predecessor, The Ministry of Pain is a novel of aporias and impasses: a story that is as nostalgic as it is critical of nostalgia, a novel about being simultaneously ‘homesick and sick of home’,2 and about both the necessity of remembering and the disquieting virtues of forgetting. Covering the thematic triptych of war, return and ruins, programmatically outlined by Heinrich Böll, The Ministry of Pain is the novel that perhaps most fully realizes the idea of a post-1989 ‘literature of the east European ruins’.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Dubravka Ugresic, The Ministry of Pain, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Saqi, 2005), p. 34.
Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 52.
Quoted in Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. Debevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 183.
Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), p. 177.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, Briefe an eine Freundin (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1847), p. 191.
Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (London: Penguin, 1983), p. 3.
Copyright information
© 2013 David Williams
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Williams, D. (2013). Aporias, Impasses and Ostalgia. In: Writing Postcommunism. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330086_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137330086_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-46084-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33008-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)