Being a writer from one of the old regions that made up Yugoslavia, as is the case of Dubravka Ugresić It means having an imperatively constructive and creative background. It is a question of balance, of rescuing humanity from the most recent catastrophe in Europe, which closed the XNUMXth century practically from the same place where it began with its first Great War.
For a veteran writer like Dubravka, great works materialize from patience and potency.. To which she adds virtuous observation skills and a hopeful conviction of her healing literature. Without a doubt, a composition of ingredients that is gaining followers from the harmony and the makings of a narrative with a desire for transcendence.
In Dubravka, that notion of the total writer is discovered, of the creator who does not give up in her endeavor to make her bibliography a single long book, a testimony in installments where her own personal evolution adds prisms and edges. existentialists filled with that knowledge of experience that gives meaning to the natural contradictions of the human. The work of this Croatian writer will end when she finishes her last book. Meanwhile everything is stitched together with that light and shiny thread that ends up basting everything.
Dubravka Ugresic's Top 3 Recommended Novels
The age of the skin
The skin has a memory like the bark of an ancient tree. In this book we discover how memory tattoos trace wrinkles and folds, marking and wearing down the dermis, fixing the indelible grooves of what we end up being.
Tattoos and body modification, music that colors and nuances sporting events, Planet of the Apes, humor and experience. The collapse that Yugoslavia experienced, and the consequent exile of the author, lead us to reflections on nationalism, crime and politics.
Dubravka Ugresic boldly looks up to acquire a humanistic perspective and thus portray those iconic characters from the former Eastern bloc who currently work as cleaners in the Netherlands or who open clandestine shops with products from their countries of origin. Dubravka Ugrešic, winner of the Neustadt International Prize, elegantly leads us to the keys that allow us to understand the present: from La La Land to Lenin's corpse.
Fox
Faced with deception and trompe l'oeil, man is not as cunning as the fox. And perhaps it is from the will of wanting to be deceived. But it is also true that, like the fox, the pragmatic human being always looks for an entrance and an exit before entering the corral of his desires, delights, vices and hopes.
The fox is a bastard: a wild being, a cheater and a thief, a creature who does not respect norms or limits; exactly like the writer. And also as the voice of this story, fragmented and multilingual, which we can perhaps call a "novel." There is only one question: how are stories created?
The narrator, in her search for an answer, will go from the United States to Japan through Russia, Italy and Croatia, and will tell us about writers with secret autobiographies, about artists awarded thanks to their widows, about romances marked by the irruption of war and of girls who summon with a few words all the power of literature. Nabokov, Pilniak, Tanizaki… Lectures, classes and interviews.
And I play, above all, I play, in a brilliant puzzle that combines experiences, reflections and invention and that invites us to explore the deceptive border that exists between reality and fiction. Ugrešic's great work is an incomparable autofictional adventure that plunges the reader into a literary labyrinth to claim the power of stories. A complex and dark artifact that combines passion, humor and erudition, from the hand of one of the most important voices on the current European scene.
Baba Yaga laid an egg
The thing about Dubravka is that formal destructuring that manages to focus everything on the beauty of the aesthetic and on the transcendence of the gestures that are usually priceless but always full of meaning that no one would ever want to make explicit ...
Baba Yagá is a dark and lonely creature, a witch who abducts children and lives in the forest, in a house that stands on chicken feet. But she also travels through the stories, and in each one she takes on a new form: a writer who returns to her mother's native Bulgaria, who, haunted by old age, asks her to visit the places she already has. he will not be able to return; a trio of mysterious old women who stay for a few days at a spa specializing in longevity treatments; and a folklorist who tirelessly investigates the traditional figure of the witch.
Old women, wives, mothers, daughters, lovers. All of them come together in Baba Yaga. Straddling the autobiography, the essay and the supernatural tale, her story becomes that of Medusa, Medea and so many other cursed figures, drawing an exciting triptych about how women appear and disappear from the collective memory.
A masterful tale of stories that, full of wit and insight, puts in the spotlight the well-known figure of the wicked old woman. A fascinating journey in which Baba Yagá, adopting numerous disguises, invites us to explore the world of myths and to reflect on identity, female stereotypes and the power of fables.
