The Age of Skin

Winner of the 2016 Neustadt International Prize for Literature.

It takes a stranger to see how dark this world is: Dubravka Ugresic is that stranger.—Joseph Brodsky

Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.—John Balaban, Washington Post

A genuinely free-thinker, Ugresic's attachment to absurdity leads her down paths where other writers fear to tread.—The Independent

As long as some, like Ugresic, who can write well, do, there will be hope for the future.—New Criterion

Ugresic's wit is bound by no preconceived purposes, and once the story takes off, a wild freedom of association and adventurous discernment is set in motion. . . . Ugresic dissects the social world.—World Literature Today

Never has a writer been more aware of how one narrative depends on another.—Joanna Walsh

Ugresic is unbeatable at explaining the inexplicable entanglements of Balkan cultural traditions, particularly as they relate to the hellish position of women.—Clive James

Ugresic is also affecting and eloquent, in part because within her quirky, aggressively sweet plot she achieves moments of profundity and evokes the stoicism innate in such moments.—Mary Gaitskill

Ugresic must be numbered among what Jacques Maritain called the dreamers of the true; she draws us into the dream.—New York Times

Dubravka Ugresic is the philosopher of evil and exile, and the storyteller of many shattered lives.—Charles Simic

Auteur

Dubravka Ugresic is the author of six works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and six essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke Culture. She went into exile from Croatia after being labeled a "witch" for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She now resides in the Netherlands. In 2016, she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work.

Texte du rabat

From one of Europe's premier essayists and cultural critics, a new collection about our troubling political times

Résumé

A New York Times Editors' Choice

These essays are written on the skin of the times. Dubravka Ugresic, 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. Ugresic 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.

Échantillon de lecture
"There's Nothing Here!"

1. The culture of bathing has played a pivotal role in the history of civilization. Although it, the history of civilization, is rooted in wars, conquests, famous battles, and male heroics, there were those, like the old Romans, who left behind them something useful as well. Wherever they passed, Romans built public baths, Roman hot springs, and references to the goddess Minerva, whose name adorns many a hot-springs hotel. Turks, Arabs, the Islamic world, have given civilization public baths, hamamas, and made affordable to all the habit of bathing. Northern Europe has saunas or banyas or baths, the folk mythology of water, legends about miraculous cures and rejuvenation, mythical beings, river fairies, a whole water-bound imagination. The Russian banya is an inseparable part of Russian everyday life, but also a frequent motif in legends, fairy tales, and literature (Mayakovsky, Zoschenko), and in movies as well. The plot of Eldar Ryazanov's movie The Irony of Fate or Enjoy Your Bath! (1975), begins in a Russian bathhouse; in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007) a London banya frequented by the Russian underworld serves as the site for brutal showdowns. Famous western European spa cities, such as Baden-Baden, were visited by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, while Karlovy Vary was a favorite haunt for Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, Peter the Great, Turgenev, and, again, Tolstoy. Milan Kundera wasn't wrong when he set the plot of The Farewell Partyhis little pearl of a novelin a Czech spa.

   One way or another I keep stumbling over hot springs, even when my travels take me there for non-hot-springs reasons, such as when I was invited to the University of Warwick. While there, I explored the Royal Leamington Spa, active in the nineteenth century and visited twice by Queen Victoria herself. I visit hot springs for more reasons than just my bad back. While there I limber up my perceptive capabilities. Hot springs have a sobering and entrancing effect on me, not only do they confront me with my medical needs but with my social status, meanwhile fostering a feeling of general well-being, giving wings to the illusion that things are far better than they actually are.

   Abi Wright, an expert on the fast-expanding spa industry, claims that the price of a day at the spa runs from £20 to £2000. The clientele select their place in the social hierarchy. And right here, in this zone, the dynamic is the most intense. People (shall we call them hotspringers?) travel for many miles, as do the Croatian retirees who in semi-secrecy sneak off by bus to the Vruica baths in the Serbian part of Bosnia and HerzegovinaRepublika Srpska. The retiree-traitors pay the despised Serbs for spa services because the Bosnian Serb spas are cheaper and better in quality than the spas in Croatia. Spas are, therefore, a test of patriotism. When it comes to spas, patriotism gives way to frugality. There you have a detail which makes sense only to Croats and Serbs. The keys for entering one's password on ATMs in the Republika Srpska offer two language options: English or local. This, too, is something only local people understand. The language of the locals is dragon-tongue: it flicks its three equal tongues, Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. And the entire modern complex of hot springs, known as Banja Vruica, is dominated by an Orthodox shrine, one in a series of recently built, standard-form Orthodox, Muslim, and Catholic places of worship scattered across the landscape of Bosnia and Herzegovina, reminiscent of standard-form Chinese restaurants.

2. Why do I find myself drawn to hot springs? I enjoy playing the anthropologist on a clandestine mission: I watch the subtle flow of people and money where one least expects or notices it. The spas I have in mind were built on earlier Austro-Hungarian foundations (and these were raised on Roman spas), or they sprouted during the Socialist era. Most have not been recently renovated, or if they have, the renovation has been patchy. Many are now in ruins. They were occupied by war veterans from the most recent war (19911995) whobeset by alcohol, drugs, and troublesvented their anger on the hot springs. Under the roofs of spas, the old communist utopia (the dream of highly professional, well-lit, and modern sanatoriums for all) stagnates and mingles with a dose of post-communist human despair, along with mildew festering on the tiles, and the yellowed hydro-massage baths. I read the things around me differently than does the spa staff, postcommunist kids, those cute humanoids whose memory cards have been erased. I'm older than they are and, though I may have no proof, I know a second level lie…