THE CULTURE OF LIES, last collection of essays I have of Dubravka Ugrešić's to review

THE CULTURE OF LIES
DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ (tr. Celia Hawkesworth)
Open Letter Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$9.95 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: The Culture of Lies is one of the most intelligent and lucid accounts of an appalling episode in history. It shows us the banality and brutality of nationalism and the way that nationalistic ideology permeates every pore of life. Ugrešić's acerbic and penetrating essays cover everything from politics to daily routine, from public to private life.

With a diverse and unusual perspective, she writes about memory, soap operas, the destruction of everyday life, kitsch, the conformity of intellectuals, propaganda and censorship, the strategies of human manipulation and the walls of Europe which, she argues, never really did fall.

Shot through with irony and sadness, satirical protest and bitter melancholy, The Culture of Lies is a gesture of intellectual resistance by a writer branded "a traitor" and "a witch" in Croatia.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A collection of very wise, trenchant, and tendentious essays to cap off #WITMonth.

Shifting from Yugoslav nationality to Croatian was not a seamless process for Author Dubravka. A new passport under a new governing entity does not change the passport holder's identity or thought processes or, dangerously, political beliefs. Dissent is even more dangerous in a newly created state struggling to distance itself from the burdensome and ill-fitting imposed identity and ideology. Author Dubravka didn't fit in when Yugoslav was a political state's demonym, but neither did loads of other folk. "Croatian" as a political demonym is new enough that to dissent from the new ruling class is to risk losing the right to use it. This is where Author Dubravka ended up, an ethnic Croat instead of a Croatian citizen.

Labels don't matter much to me in my white US male's privilege. Unless I insist on bringing my Otherness to the fore, I can simply walk around being an "American," a label that makes me wince at its arrogance. Author Dubravka did not exist in that bubble of certainty. Her identity, dissenter, observer, critic, meant her labeling got complicated quickly in the upheavals of Communism's death throes. The wry tone of these works does not foreground a thing I perceive, possibly that I interpolate, the trauma and pain of losing an identity, a building block of selfhood. It's clear the fact of that loss is central to Author Dubravka's work; she does not wallow or lament but rather observes and analyzes. I still feel an edge of strong emotion despite it not being foregrounded.

I know of a writer colleague who claimed to a foreign journalist that he was ‘the victim of repression’ under Yugo-communism, that his books were banned, and that he had been in prison. That colleague was never in prison nor was he ‘the victim of repression’ and all his books were regularly published. I do not believe that he was lying. Exposed to media brainwashing, terror by forgetting and collective compulsion, my colleague had simply forgotten his personal history, he carried out an unconscious mental touching-up, and in the general context the spoken lie became an acceptable truth. And after all, the foreign journalist had come to hear just such a story, in his Westerner’s head he already carried such a stereotype: the story of a repressed writer in the former communist regime and a happy end in the new, democratic one.

It's not a shouted pain, it's a carefully phrased analysis of trauma's aftermath that shows how very painful it was for all to need to re-craft selves when their world ended. New nationalisms, new canons, new ethnic expressions glorified...all processes we undergo in youth and that are painful enough to live through even in that more mentally agile passage of life; as an older, even an old, person...!

I am no one. And everyone. In Croatia I shall be a Serb, in Serbia a Croat, in Bulgaria a Turk, in Turkey a Greek, in Greece a Macedonian, in Macedonia a Bulgarian… Being an ethnic ‘bastard’ or ’schizophrenic’ is my natural choice, I even consider it a sign of mental and moral health. And I know that I am not alone. Violent, stubborn insistence on national identities has provoked a response: today many young citizens of former Yugoslavia, particularly those scattered throughout the world, stubbornly refuse any ethnic labels.

There is a lot to be learned for us in the US on the subject of nationalism and identity in 2026 that a public intellectual from a disintegrating polity can teach us from the 1990s. Author Dubravka felt, though, analyzed, contextualized for us already. I hope more of us will now absorb and appreciate that gift in our own parlous times.

A MUZZLE FOR WITCHES, probably the last time we'll get to hear from a feminist ikon

A MUZZLE FOR WITCHES
DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ (tr. Ellen Elias-Bursać)
Open Letter Books
$14.95 trade paper, available tomorrow

August 2025: 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written or translated by female-identifying artists. (Discount is applied automatically at checkout on publisher's website and applies to all hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions.)

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature As with the rest of her literary career, Dubravka Ugresić's final work, A Muzzle for Witches, is uncategorizable. On its surface, the book is an conversation with the literary critic Merima Omeragić, covering topics such as "Women and the Male Perspective," "The Culture of (Self)Harm," and "The Melancholy of Vanishing."

But the book is more than a simple interview: It's a roadmap of the literary world, exploring the past century and all of its violence and turmoil—especially in Yugoslavia, Ugresić's birth country—and providing a direction for the future of feminist writing.

One of the greatest thinkers of the past hundred years, Ugresić was one-of-a-kind, whose novels and literary essays pushed the bounds of form and content, and A Muzzle for Witches offers the chance to see her at her most raw, and most playful.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Raw and playful" are not frequently paired in a publisher's synopsis. In this outraged, affronted growl, they're two of the best words for Ugresić's œuvre as a whole, and this last distilled, refined-to-purity last work in particular. Her métier was the essay, I've even said before the screed, and this one-sitting book is a great way to get one's eye in to the tenor of her work.

It's quite an achievement to call out, I'd venture to say even to take down, the sexist, fascist Establishment that's controlled...notionally, in her case...the course of both life and career, while being amusing. Mordantly so, but amusing nonetheless. Author Dubravka does this trick regularly. I'm very impressed by this because it means her focus is not on her topic of outrage. The outrage is there, but unlike the literature of grievance that grows so stale so very quickly. Jeremiads are so deeply tedious as anything except a light seasoning on top of one's regular reading.

The title of these collected interviews with a literary critic from Croatia, Merima Omeragić, is a call-out to the (male-dominated) Croatian establishment's characterization of her as a "witch" when her anti-war attitudes got her hounded into exile in 1993. "Muzzle me, you dickheads?" one can hear her thinking in this title. I do not know if she chose it, but it certainly captures her acerbic, flensing-knife wit.

What we, as a literary society, lost on her 2023 death, was an acute observer...better to say "witness" of the Ship of Fools we're riding on. Dubravka Ugrešić saw it from her berth in Second Class, where she was assigned, but never, ever stayed. Her head was the Imperial Suite's sole occupant. She saw right through the oppressive systems designed to reduce her to a compliant drone, a life support system for a uterus.

We need this voice as a society. The women who vote in the 2024 US elections should read this, and other feminists of an earlier generation, because their privileges are not secure when their very rights to bodily autonomy are being rolled back at a great rate of speed.

THE AGE OF SKIN: Essays by the late thinker/cultural critic Dubravka Ugrešić

THE AGE OF SKIN: Essays
DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ (tr. Ellen Elias-Bursać.)
Open Letter Books
August 2025: 40% discount on all Open Letter titles written or translated by female-identifying artists. (Discount is applied automatically at checkout on publisher's website and applies to all hardcover, paperback, and ebook editions.)

$16.96 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: These essays are written on the skin of the times. Dubravka Ugrešić, winner of the Neustadt International Prize and one of Europe’s most influential writers, with biting humor and a multitude of cultural references—from La La Land and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, to tattoos and body modification, World Cup chants, and the preservation of Lenin’s corpse—takes on the dreams, hopes, and fears of modern life. The collapse of Yugoslavia, and the author’s subsequent exile from Croatia, leads to reflections on nationalism and the intertwining of crime and politics. Ugrešić writes at eye level, from a human perspective, in portraits of people from the former Eastern Bloc, who work as cleaners in the Netherlands or start underground shops with products from their country of origin.

A rare and welcome combination of irony, compassion, and a sharp polemic gaze characterizes these beautiful and highly relevant essays.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: There is a timelessness to the literary form we call the screed. These extended snorts of derision, grumbles of dissatisfaction, howls of anguish, form in their bulk a screed against Ugrešić's many crotchets with the modern capitalist, hyperconsumptive, obsessional "culture" that's permeated our planet and bids fair to destroy its capacity to support us.

Technology has empowered him, our former statistic, to finally take center stage. Did not he, this worm in human form, also come into the world to leave his mark?! And sure enough, the little guys have raced to leave their mark, developing in the process voracious appetites: some of them strip naked and bare their posterior, others their genitalia, some sing, others write, some dance, others paint, while some are multiplexes and do all of this at once. The little guy has finally conquered the media.

The technology to have what Andy Warhol famously predicted would be our universally available "world-famous for fifteen minutes" cultural due is in place; is being used; and exacerbates the overuse of resources by the stupid on their individual search of their fifteen-minute slice:

Where did I go wrong, a friend of mine asked, an astrophysicist. He was left jobless, and scrolled through his computer to find something, anything, to make ends meet. There before him on the computer screen loomed Kim Kardashian’s large, oiled butt.{...} Kim Kardashian’s butt came jumping off every website, the world over, wherever he clicked. My friend realized this butt was the final greeting from a civilization breathing its last, and he relaxed. The Kardashian meteorite came slowly closer, in another second it would crash into Earth and shatter into a million bits. Where have I gone wrong, asked the astrophysicist with the last vestiges of his brain.

Flaunt what you like, show what you've got, no one's paying attention because everyone's looking for their reflection in your shiny, oiled-up abs, ass, tits.

{A}ll the world looks like a beach party, bare-naked bodies chanting Gorky’s man, how proud it sounds, that everything is cool, couldn’t be cooler, the party will last till the liberated bodies are stilled by that inevitable shovelful of dirt.

Even after they pat you in the face with a spade, your selfies and your butt will be proof for so long as the bits and bytes have juice to keep them available to whoever cares to look that You Were Here, that once upon a time Granny had a slammin' beach bod, that Papaw was well-hung, that Mom and Dad liked anal, too.

Everyone is preoccupied with their own life, their own little existence. And as long as people stare obsessively at their reflection on the smooth screen, there will be no room for the lives of others, there is simply no room.

No room, no room...never enough room for all the nothing-much that people want to insulate themselves against oblivion with, the immense pile of stuff we're pretty much padded from the grim reality that all that stuff came from someone's labor, made from resources they can't access, and all you're doing with it is plonking it into a (rented) storage unit until you die and whoever has to clean up after you throws it out, sells it, donates it to the needy.

And when the victims are many, there’s no place for them in human hearts of average emotional capacity. It bears remembering that in this society of ours, rooted in an overweening happiness, empathy has been jettisoned.

"The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have Me," says the original christian according to Matthew...and haven't his co-religionists just taken that right to heart, as written though not as it was intended. In a world padded by stuff the blows of misfortune and reversal aren't as sharp, are thye, so stuff is doing its job...dulling you to the reality that all the noise, all the "I AM, I AM, I AM" we shout onto the smooth screens reflecting the vacant spots that are the Others, is an appalling, desperate din of misery and not a joyful noise unto the lord.

Stupidity has become, over time, far too burdensome for me. I am finding it difficult to breathe under its weight and cannot shake free of it. I tried for a while with laughter, and, to be sure, that helped. But now stupidity has barged in, made itself at home, and soaked up all the oxygen. A quarter century ago, stupidity grabbed the microphone, gleeful with self-confidence, and hogged center stage. There is no hope that it will be relinquishing its position any time soon.

Bitter, disillusioned old curmudgeon that I am, Dubravka Ugrešić speaks for me more eloquently than I can mange to do for myself. Her death in March, 2023, was a huge loss of honesty, clarity, and grouchy, disappointed screed-making. I know I feel it as a loss. If you read these trenchant essays I expect you might, as well.