A Muzzle for Witches

Starred review from July 15, 2024
A celebrated writer and thinker answers smart questions about misogyny, nationalism, resistance, and the nature of art. Respected for both her fiction and scholarly work, Ugresic (1949-2023) became the first woman to win the NIN Award--Yugoslavia's highest literary honor--in 1988. When Yugoslavia was riven by ethnic conflicts and fights for independence a few years later, the author became a pariah for her anti-war stance. The book's title alludes to one of the epithets hurled at her during this time. Though she left her home, she never stopped writing about the place of her birth and the violence that tore it apart. This collection of interviews with Omeragic is her final published work. In "Women and the male perspective," Ugresic illustrates the pervasive power of misogyny by describing the life of her novelSteffie Cvek and the Jaws of Life, from inception to critical reception and transformation into a movie that turned her feminist fiction into cheap laughs at the expense of women. Elsewhere, the author recounts how the literary curiosity and experimentation of her youth had devolved into prose grounded in misogyny, bigotry, and dirty jokes by the 1980s. "The implanting of cultural memes" is an incisive exploration of how populism and digital media have blurred "the boundaries between culture and subculture, high and low, elite and commercial, authentic and imitational." Even as Ugresic offers astute critiques of international phenomena, her thoughts always come back to Yugoslavia. She celebrates the subversive power and linguistic richness of children's books while lamenting the didactic turn Yugoslavia's children's literature took when divided by nationalism. As she surveys the contemporary cultural landscape in the former Yugoslavia, she finds them "seriously compromised. Because how can a culture founded on the principle of ethnic exclusivity call itself a culture?" Sage closing remarks from a vital public intellectual.

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Starred review from August 5, 2024
Novelist and essayist Ugrešić
(The Culture of Lies), who died in 2023, delivers an incisive critique of the nationalist and patriarchal literary establishment that arose in Croatia following the 1992 dissolution of Yugoslavia. Presented as an interview with critic Merima Omeragić
, the treatise tackles such subjects as the subversiveness of children’s fiction. Ugrešić
argues that the absurdity and irony found throughout young people’s literature undermine the “pomposity” and “imprimatur of the grand” associated with national literary canons. She excoriates former Croatian president Franjo Tuđman
, who spearheaded the post-Yugoslav “cultural libricide” in which non-Croatian literature was purged from libraries, and refutes the belief held by “cultural conservatives” that “only through one’s national literature is it possible to come to world literature,” explaining how she instead paved her own path to the international stage through defiance and subversion. (Ugrešić
’s insistence on identifying as Yugoslav rather than Croatian, as well as her feminist novels, caused the media to brand her as a “witch.”) Ugrešić
expresses a refreshing commitment to the “invisible” space of literature where the participation of one great reader is enough to provide fulfillment. Lovers of international literature will be energized by this bracing tonic. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.