Born in Croatia when it was part of Yugoslavia, Dubravka Ugrešić is both a writer and scholar of Russian literature. Her works include the playful novella Steffie Speck in the Jaws of Life, the English translation of which appears in a collection which includes several short stories that play with Russian literature, such as “A Hot Dog in a Warm Bun,” a reworking of Gogol’s “The Nose” (In the Jaws of Life and Other Stories, trans. Celia Hawkesworth and Michael Henry Heim). In the early 1990s, the breakup of Yugoslavia resulted in the emergence of six independent nations and the horror of the war in the Balkans. During this time, Ugrešić was hounded out of Croatia for publicly condemning the war-driven nationalism pervading Croatian society. She settled in Amsterdam, becoming a writer in exile, and has also spent time in the United States, teaching literature at several universities. Her fiction and essay collections are widely available in English translation, and she won the prestigious Neustadt Prize for literature in 2016. Thank You for Not Reading, translated by Celia Hawkesworth, is a 2003 collection of essays (now reissued by Open Letter), in which Ugrešić, with her trademark sardonic wit, takes on the workings of the Western literary marketplace from the point of view of an exiled East European writer.
Thank You for Not Reading begins with Ugrešić’s account of attending the opening of the London Book Fair, the ceremony hosted by Joan Collins. This image encapsulates the collection’s main idea that “trivia has swamped contemporary literary life and become […] more important than the books.” The literary marketplace is concerned with what sells, regardless of the quality. In these conditions, “[i]t is not writers […] but the powerful literary marketplace that establishes aesthetic values,” embodied in books more likely to be at supermarket checkouts than in university libraries. In “Book Proposal,” Ugrešić imagines submitting book proposals of classic literary texts, with the editor telling her to add more sex and a gay husband to Madame Bovary and to update Anna Karenina to include the KGB. The market’s turn away from serious literature produces a meaningless “literary democracy” whereby anyone can be a writer, including “girlfriends of renowned murderers who describe the murderer from a more intimate perspective [and] housewives bored with daily life who have decided to try the creative life.” In this absurd schema, Ivana Trump exists side by side with Joseph Brodsky, in one case literally, when Ugrešić comes across reviews of both their works – negative for Brodsky, positive for Ivana Trump – in the same issue of the New York Times Book Review.
In an unexpected parallel that is at the same time understandable from an East European writer, the type of literature favored by the market reminds Ugrešić of socialist realism. To be sure, celebrity memoirs and Danielle Steele novels are a far cry from works about model communists overfulfilling production quotas. Yet she sees a similarity in the general emphases and goals of both types of writing: “[c]ontemporary market literature is realistic, optimistic, joyful, sexy, explicitly or implicitly didactic, and intended for the broad reading masses. As such, it ideologically remolds and educates the working people in the spirit of personal victory, the victory of some good over some evil. It is socialist realist.” The tendency toward edification is, for example, reflected in the use of “how” (to do something), which appears in the titles of such otherwise disparate works as How the Steel Was Tempered and How Stella Got Her Groove Back. Like socialist realism, market-driven literature ceases to be an intellectual, aesthetic endeavor and becomes a programmatic how-to guide.
Despite the upbraiding the market receives in Thank You for Not Reading, Ugrešić avoids the clichéd opposition between the low-brow marketplace and high-art writers. Rather, she upbraids writers for giving in to market demands; as she says, the “market intellectualizes triviality, intellectuals trivialize intellectuality.” Invited to participate in a televised discussion with other writers, Ugrešić wryly observes that, while she stayed silent during the hours-long broadcast, those who got the limelight knew how to turn the conversation to themselves and perform a writer’s role rather than genuinely discuss literature. The literary market values image over substance and writers go along, a situation in which a book’s content is secondary to its author’s TV appearances and advertising of said book. Had Thank You for Not Reading been written a few years later, it is tempting to imagine the drubbing Ugrešić would give writers for their use of social media, tailor-made for endless self-promotion and actively encouraging performativity.
It is not just American and West European writers who sell out. Never one to shy away from criticizing her compatriots, Ugrešić observes that “selling [… their] East European literary souvenirs,” these writers also attempt to grab their share of the marketplace by capitalizing on Western clichés about their homelands. A writer from a literature relatively unknown in the West, such as Croatian, “plays the provincial game,” presenting her or himself as living “on the cultural periphery”; a Russian, on the other hand, “prefers to play the card of the historically traumatized writer.” To be sure, Ugrešić well knows and in no way discounts the difficulty East European writers have in finding readership in the West. Rather, her criticism of souvenir hawking is aimed at these writers’ willingness to self-exoticize to sell books.
The discussion of being forced out of Croatia and having to make a life as an East European writer in the West permeates Thank You for Not Reading and is its most poignant aspect. The longest essay in the collection is “The Writer in Exile,” a meditation on the relationship between exile and writing. In her assessment of exile, Ugrešić resembles Brodsky, who experienced it both as a profound loss but also as a new creative life. Ugrešić asserts that exiled writers often “adapt themselves to the image that they believe is expected of them” by Western audiences, which hinges on victimhood and trauma. Yet there exists a different path, one that Ugrešić herself has chosen. As she says, an exiled writer experiences an “intoxicating and frightening freedom. That freedom implies acceptance of marginality and isolation. In choosing exile, [the writer] has chosen loneliness.” However, this loneliness, while difficult, is not altogether negative because it is a consequence of freedom. This freedom comes from refusing to succumb to assigned roles both in the old and new homes, and, whatever the cost, writing and living according to one’s own convictions.
Ugrešić’s pointed rejection of the nationalist line in Croatia, a theme that runs throughout Thank You for Not Reading, is the strongest testament of adhering to her principles despite the risks. “A Short Contribution to the History of a National Literature: The Top Ten Reasons to Be a Croatian Writer” sends up Croatian ideas of national identity, as well as all national identities that hinge on an us vs. them mentality. The list, which includes such crucial identity markers as love for “mountaineering metaphors” due a small nation’s obsession with size, culminates in the top reason being “because then you’re not a Serbian writer. The same holds true for Serbian writers — the best reason to be one is so as not to be Croatian. In fact, all of the top ten reasons why it’s good to be a Croatian writer apply to Serbian writers. And Bosnian writers. And others as well.” Although this essay is tonally tongue-in-cheek, Ugrešić’s stance is a stalwart example of moral integrity and courage. The Serbs’ brutality against Croatia, and most notably Bosnia, is undeniable. It takes a nuanced and principled way of thinking to avoid succumbing to narratives of collective hatred and self-righteous superiority, and bravery to voice these opinions in a country unwilling to hear them. The loss of home and a nomadic, transnational existence resulting from this decision have been difficult but worth it. As she says, “[m]y fear of the local is stronger than my skepticism of the global.”
Despite its serious subject matter, Thank You for Not Reading is a funny book, with Ugrešić’s biting wit carried over in Hawkesworth’s translation. My sole criticism is that Hawkesworth continually reproduces Slavic languages’ inbuilt use of “he” to refer to people in general despite the ability of English to get around such usage. In the 21st century, this is grating, all the more so in a book that criticizes patriarchal attitudes in the literary sphere. That aside, this collection is an insightful and poignant work by a writer who invites those who genuinely care about books to do the opposite of its cleverly taunting title.
[Published by Open Letter on April 12, 2022, 220 pages, $15.95, paperback]