Cafe Europa Revisited

Zusatztext "This far ranging yet intimate work invites readers to consider contemporary European life in all its complexities." Booklist (starred) "Graceful essays a fine guide to many aspects of a region poorly understood by much of the West. A thoughtful insider's perspective on Eastern Europe's fitful steps toward democracy." Kirkus Reviews Informationen zum Autor Slavenka Drakulic was born in Croatia in 1949. The author of several works of nonfiction and novels, she has written for The New York Times , The Nation , The New Republic , and numerous publications around the world. Klappentext An evocative and timely collection of essays that paints a portrait of Eastern Europe thirty years after the end of communism. An immigrant with a parrot in Stockholm, a photo of a girl in Lviv, a sculpture of Alexander the Great in Skopje, a memorial ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the Soviet led army invasion of Prague: these are a few glimpses of life in Eastern Europe today. Three decades after the Velvet Revolution, Slavenka Drakulic, the author of Cafe Europa and A Guided Tour of the Museum Of Communism, takes a look at what has changed and what has remained the same in the region in her daring new essay collection. Totalitarianism did not die overnight and democracy did not completely transform Eastern European societies. Looking closely at artefacts and day to day life, from the health insurance cards to national monuments, and popular films to cultural habits, alongside pieces of growing nationalism and Brexit, these pieces of political reportage dive into the reality of a Europe still deeply divided. Zusammenfassung "Drakulic's composite portrait provides a clear-eyed look at European values, and what they really amount to." The New Yorker An evocative and timely collection of essays that paints a portrait of Eastern Europe thirty years after the end of communism. An immigrant with a parrot in Stockholm, a photo of a girl in Lviv, a sculpture of Alexander the Great in Skopje, a memorial ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the Soviet led army invasion of Prague: these are a few glimpses of life in Eastern Europe today. Three decades after the Velvet Revolution, Slavenka Drakulic, the author of Cafe Europa and A Guided Tour of the Museum Of Communism , takes a look at what has changed and what has remained the same in the region in her daring new essay collection. Totalitarianism did not die overnight and democracy did not completely transform Eastern European societies. Looking closely at artefacts and day to day life, from the health insurance cards to national monuments, and popular films to cultural habits, alongside pieces of growing nationalism and Brexit, these pieces of political reportage dive into the reality of a Europe still deeply divided....

Auteur

Slavenka Drakulic was born in Croatia in 1949. The author of several works of nonfiction and novels, she has written for The New York Times, The Nation, The New Republic, and numerous publications around the world.

Texte du rabat

An evocative and timely collection of essays that paints a portrait of Eastern Europe thirty years after the end of communism.

An immigrant with a parrot in Stockholm, a photo of a girl in Lviv, a sculpture of Alexander the Great in Skopje, a memorial ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the Soviet led army invasion of Prague: these are a few glimpses of life in Eastern Europe today. Three decades after the Velvet Revolution, Slavenka Drakulic, the author of Cafe Europa and A Guided Tour of the Museum Of Communism, takes a look at what has changed and what has remained the same in the region in her daring new essay collection.

Totalitarianism did not die overnight and democracy did not completely transform Eastern European societies. Looking closely at artefacts and day to day life, from the health insurance cards to national monuments, and popular films to cultural habits, alongside pieces of growing nationalism and Brexit, these pieces of political reportage dive into the reality of a Europe still deeply divided.

Résumé
"Drakulić’s composite portrait provides a clear-eyed look at European values, and what they really amount to." —The New Yorker

An evocative and timely collection of essays that paints a portrait of Eastern Europe thirty years after the end of communism.

An immigrant with a parrot in Stockholm, a photo of a girl in Lviv, a sculpture of Alexander the Great in Skopje, a memorial ceremony for the 50th anniversary of the Soviet led army invasion of Prague: these are a few glimpses of life in Eastern Europe today. Three decades after the Velvet Revolution, Slavenka Drakulic, the author of Cafe Europa and A Guided Tour of the Museum Of Communism, takes a look at what has changed and what has remained the same in the region in her daring new essay collection.

Totalitarianism did not die overnight and democracy did not completely transform Eastern European societies. Looking closely at artefacts and day to day life, from the health insurance cards to national monuments, and popular films to cultural habits, alongside pieces of growing nationalism and Brexit, these pieces of political reportage dive into the reality of a Europe still deeply divided.

Échantillon de lecture
**ONCE UPON A TIME IN 1989

**The Berlin Wall had already fallen and the people in Eastern Eu-rope were celebrating the new era without communism. But the news did not seem to concern Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu until the last day he ever addressed his people, December 21, 1989. A close- up on camera caught him at the exact moment when he realized that the tide was turning against him, that people are no longer applauding and cheering, but booing him. His shock and the disbelief I saw in that face will stay with me forever as an iconic picture of the change.
Apparently, people rarely see the big picture or immediately understand the real meaning of events they witness. In the case of the fall of communism, the dominating feeling at the time, it seems to me, was surprise. Joy came only afterward, mixed with a bit of suspicion.
Such fragmented pictures and emotions deeply deposited in our memory. The whole big earthquake, its causes and consequences, escaped us then only to come back later as history. Therefore it becomes important how we remember it, if there are discrepancies and gaps, like we know it from the old times.

Indeed, a discrepancy that comes to my mind when remember-ing 1989 is the one between history and fantasy. There was a cer-tain innocent naïveté sweeping over Eastern Europe, the hope that the fall of communism would be, in some way, a guarantee that we would live happily ever after. The reason I call it innocent is that we really didn’t know what to expect, but we knew what we wanted: glitter and glamour, like on the other side, in the West. What else could we think of, but sheer old- fashioned magic, as in a provincial circus performance? Or in fairy tales for that matter. In our perception, what had just happened was nothing but a fairy tale, in which a poor young man, overcoming insurmountable ob-stacles put in his way by the princess’s father, wins her heart and becomes a king himself. What other concept— or, indeed, “narra-tive,” as it is called today— did we know? Democracy was a vague and distant idea, a theory never to be reached in practice. Human rights even more so. And capitalism we understood only as far as supermarkets full of incredible food and unknown trifles took us. That was a reality we could touch and smell, consume, buy, possess— the very measure of our success. Hard work for little money, poverty and jobless people were not part of that parcel.

We had no experience of the new world opening up to us; we had only dreams made of TV images, movies, …