It is clear from these two collections of essays that Ugresic does not take kindly to being labelled – especially with national labels – but the facts above explain her main preoccupations. In Nobody’s Home she writes about home (or lack thereof), globalisation, identity, exile in its many forms, alienation, ‘Ostalgia’ and the weight of history in former Eastern bloc countries, Europe and its problems with orientation – political, geographical and cultural. I especially like her thoughts about culture as a spiritual euro, and how politically correct respect for different cultures and cultural differences is often a mask for closet chauvinism. Ugresic begins with entertaining anecdotal pieces about flea markets and the nature of luggage, and gradually the pieces become longer and more serious, as she weaves history and politics into her personal reminiscences and tales of people she has encountered - most of them uprooted cosmopolitans as she is. She has the knack of reaching macro insights through the micro-narratives, and convincing with her tongue in cheek.
Most of these preoccupations pop up on a smaller scale in Thank You for Not Reading, though here Ugresic writes about being a writer in the global literary marketplace – specifically, about being a writer from a small country, a female writer, and a writer of serious fiction in an age of frivolity. The structure is similar to that of Nobody’s Home: semi-humorous personal anecdotes make the essays what they are, she begins with musings about Joan Collins, and the pieces get gradually longer and more theoretical. There is no shaky ground here she certainly knows what she is talking about. Ugresic admits in her foreword that the essays are ‘half fact and half fiction’, and she has adopted a persona to mediate between the light-hearted and the serious. If the quality of essays is determined by the number of individual ideas and flashes of brilliance per page, then these get top marks: my little reading notebook is now full of quotable passages, relevant page numbers, and thoughts and questions these books raised in my mind. It is thought-provoking reading, they give no answers, but rather encourage you to take up a pen and write down your own.
3 comments:
Hi E.
Disaffection and alienation are the two hallmarks of modern life that have haunted me since I was a kid. Dramatic individuality is now impossible, I think, and now we have a kind of individual nuancing or incrementatlizing, which Ugresic seems to tap.
This hit me in a big way years ago. I had always aimed to do some big art, find and develop a visual voice. This sounds naive, and it was, but that's youth. Anyway, I went to visit a friend who was curating the Inuit collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario. We took the elevator down two floors below street level to his warehouse room. It was down a long corridor with plain doors on each side, much like a very stripped down hotel.
His room had 12- or 16-foot ceilings, and was maybe 1200 square feet. Once inside there was another door, to the next room, part of his two-room warehouse storage suite.
That room also had an inside door to the next room, and I asked what was on the other side. It was modern American painting, and we went in. Now, this stuff was my favourite stuff at that time. There were some huge Chuck Close portraits in black and white, some Rosenquist stuff, I think, tons of stuff, great stuff.
When I asked what was through the next door in THAT room, he just said "more."
Going into a big Indigo or Chapters store is like that. There is just so much stuff, and so much overlap. WI feel like I'm being crushed by it.
This, of course, is the outcome of specialization, in which we manage to pick a particle in great wide universe to investigate. Ironically, sometimes that particle can actually be the universe.
This is very different from what, say, Rilke, faced. His poetry, I think, dealt with the broad sweep of human experience, in his case the human spirit.
I don't quite know where I'm heading with this. But it has to do with a fin de seicle thing, in which irony and cynicism trump enthusiasm and discovery. While we were modern we still had that optimism, even when it was as black as Ad Reinhardt's paintings.
Does anything we do or make mean anything? It seems I can only get my head into something when I'm detached from the media pipeline...
As you say of Ugresic: "It is thought-provoking reading, they give no answers, but rather encourage you to take up a pen and write down your own."
In a world in which everyone is an artist, of what importance is the artist?
Interesting times.
Hi EC
Interesting times we live in. Yes.
Thank you, you said much to stimulate the "little grey cells".
n'est-ce pas?
Ah, I suspect you have plenty of stimulated little grey cells already! Merry Christmas, E. Best, -G.
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