Ugresic is sharp, funny and unafraid. . . . Orwell would
approve.--Times Literary Supplement
Hurtling between Weltschmerz and wit, drollness and diatribe, entropy
and enchantment, it's the juxtaposition at the heart of Dubravka
Ugresic's writings that saw Ruth Franklin dub her the fantasy cultural
studies professor you never had. In Europe in Sepia, Ugresic, ever the
flâneur, wanders from the Midwest to Zuccotti Park, the Irish Aran
Islands to Jerusalem's Mea Shearim, from the tristesse of Dutch housing
estates to the riots of south London, charting everything from the
listlessness of Central Europe to the ennui of the Low Countries. One
finger on the pulse of an exhausted Europe, another in the wounds of
postindustrial America, Ugresic trawls the fallout of political failure
and the detritus of popular culture, mining each for revelation.
Infused with compassion and melancholic doubt, Europe in Sepia centers
on the disappearance of the future, the anxiety that no new utopian
visions have emerged from the ruins of communism; that ours is a time of
irreducible nostalgia, our surrender to pastism complete. Punctuated by
the levity of Ugresic's raucous instinct for the absurd, despair has
seldom been so beguiling.
Dubravka Ugresic is the author of several works of fiction and
several essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke
Culture. She went into exile from Croatia after being label a witch for
her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She now resides
in the Netherlands.
David Williams did his doctoral research on the post-Yugoslav
writings of Dubravka Ugresic and the idea of a literature of the Eastern
European ruins. He is the author of Writing Postcommunism.
