"Insightful... This book not only helps to illuminate the political and social problems facing much of Eastern Europe, but also sheds new light on the daily life of its residents, their emotional habits, fears and dreams." —The New York Times "Drakulic is a perceptive and amusing social critic, with a wonderful eye for detail." —The Washington Post "Profound and often bitingly funny... you'll never think about capitalism, modern history, or your perfect, white, American teeth in the same way again." —Elle
Cafe Europa ...is studded with...everyday observations that open out, like windows, to reveal wide-angled historical vistas. —The New York Times , 1997
This collection of essays by the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic illuminates with surprising clarity a concept that could be maddeningly nebulous: that countries, like the individuals who live in them, have desires too, collective desires. In this case, Drakulic is talking about the countries of Eastern Europe, countries that have been splintered apart and hastily repatched, that are only just beginning to adjust to new ways of thinking since the fall of communism. She explains how they want so badly to be considered European that their desire is almost palpable. The book's title refers to the countless cafes and shops that have eager, "me too" Western European or American names like Bonjour, Target, Four Roses, Lady, The End -- even Bonbonnière Hemingway.
Drakulic's gift is in knowing how to map the contours of nationwide hopes and dreams by tracing the habits, the wants and needs of individuals. She's at her best when she's writing about her own experiences, describing, for instance, how difficult it is for an Eastern European to cross national borders. Automatically suspected of being a potential defector (among other things), she's invariably subjected to humiliating searches and uestioning, while her Swedish husband sails through customs with barely a flash of the passport. She explains her attitudes toward money in the context of the severe economic limitations she and the women around her faced in the mid-'70s: A friend, visiting her in Zagreb at the time, remarked on how elegantly all the women were dressed. The reason, Drakulic explains, is that "spending the little surplus money was the only fun we had. The result was that we all looked and behaved as if we were rich. We developed an easy-come, easy-go attitude to money."
Sometimes Drakulic loses steam. In a chapter on mud and its ubiquity, she writes, "It seems like a sort of plot: from time to time the soil rises from beneath us, just to remind us where we come from, to tell us that most of us are nly the first generation of urban citizens." It's an interesting enough idea, but it doesn't sustain even the short chapter Drakulic devotes to it. By and large, though, Drakulic manages to show that no matter how many times borders are reconsidered or redefined, no matter what kinds of transformation a cluster of countries is forced to undergo, a nation's true character can never be reduced to simple geography. Countries are people too. -- Salon
Drakulic (How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed) notes that Eastern Europeans are so anxious to become like their Western counterparts that every city and town has a Caf Europa that is a pale imitation of similar establishments in Paris and Rome. She presents here a collection of essays that explore life in various Eastern European countries since the fall of communism. As a citizen of Croatia (formerly a part of Yugoslavia) living now in Vienna with her Swedish husband, she writes knowingly as a survivor of a communist regime, as one who realizes that pitfalls still lie ahead for nations emerging from the Soviet yoke. In Albania, she observes rage everywhere in people who seem to want to smash all vestiges of the Hoxha regime. In Romania, she comments on the execrable state in which public toilets are maintained: "[T]he standard of Romanian toilets reflects the nature of the communist system of which it is a legacy"; "the absence of any improvement is... a warning for the future of democracy" there. Drakulic's pungent and insightful ruminations not only describe life in her part of the world-she makes us feel it as well. Author tour. (Feb.)
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Drakuli'c '(How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, LJ 3/15/93) has a rare reporting talent. She observes country soil rising from beneath urban asphalt, and she knows how to explain to urbane reader the passions and desires of a marginalized Eastern culture. The specter of an international European community may be a mundane sidebar in Western newspapers, but for Drakuli'c it represents far more. Diapers, royalty, Bucharest toilets, and presumptuous cafs serve as apocryphal symbols in her collection of political essays. To the daughter of an antifascist hero, the West represents the realization that money can transcend the future and that there is more to life than the "living in the present" that communism offered. Rather than using the language of traditional economic and political analysis, Drakuli'c offers the language of everyday life to describe a momentous cultural evolution. This important book from a very talented European writer is highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/96.]-Mary Hemmings, Univ. of Calgary Lib., Alberta
Drakuli's eloquent and brave essays demand that the citizens of post-Communist Eastern Europe take personal responsibility for their roles in the new civil society.
Over the past five years, Croatian journalist and novelist Drakuli (The Balkan Express, 1993; Holograms of Fear, 1992) has emerged in the English-speaking world as a consistent, honest, stylish, and canny interpreter of Eastern Europe and ex-Yugoslavia. Her latest contribution continues that tradition (some may argue to the point of repetition), offering Drakuli's trademark essays that reach for the pulse of a country or an era by homing in on everyday events and encounters. Like her previous work, Cafe Europa serves as a protest against an East European tendency, based on decades- long experience under paternalist dictators, to shirk civic responsibility. "How does a person who is a product of a totalitarian society," she asks, "learn responsibility, individuality, initiative? By saying `no.' " Although her canvas encompasses all of the Balkans and Eastern Europe, her own Croatia bears the brunt of Drakuli's penetrating criticism. One unforgettable essay depicts Croatian president Franjo Tudjman as an object of vitriolic contempt. Both the everyday and the political milieu of post-Communist Croatia are ready subjects for Drakuli's combination of wit, scorn, and introspection. From the renaming of the streets and cutting down of trees in Zagreb, to a colleague's uncritical interview with an unrepentant Croatian Fascist, to the author's own experiences as a consumer in America and as a Croat in Israel, the Croatian essays form the backbone of this collection. Nevertheless, these 24 essays, written between 1992 and 1996, are informed by the author's image of the lands of Eastern Europe as the "infantile nations of our continent," sharing a common desire—"our longing for Europe and all that it stands for."
General readers interested in understanding the gritty realities of post-Communist Eastern Europe should grab a coffee and sit down with Cafe Europa.
