DRAKULIĆ : The Balkan Express (fülszöveg)
One of the most exciting voices to emerge from Eastern Europe amid the rubble of the collapse of communism is that of Slavenka Drakulic, the Croatian journalist and fiction writer of whom Gloria Steinem has said, "her voice belongs to the world."
In her first nonfiction book, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Drakulic illuminated the consequences and tragedies visited on individuals by forty years of Marxist socialism. Now, in The Balkan Express, written in the maelstrom of the Serbo-Croatian war—the most devastating event on the continent of Europe since the Second World War—she levels her gaze bravely and to beautiful effect on the stark human suffering and tragic ironies of that conflict.
In a series of personal essays that have the style and beauty of short stories, she shows the war's effect on her friends, colleagues, and fellow countrymen of all ethnic backgrounds. Among them: "If I Had a Son" in which she writes of her meeting with a nineteen-year-old Croatian soldier whose experience of killing has left him implacably and eerily calm; "An Actress Who Lost Her Homeland" in which we see the pain of M, a star of stage and screen who had the misfortune to live and work in Croatian Zagreb but whose husband worked in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia; and "High Heeled Shoes" in which we first learn of Dražena, a journalist who fled from the Serbian slaughter of Sarajevo. Her need for a symbol of normalcy—highheeled shoes instead of a more practical pair of sneakers—provokes in Drakulić a kind of irritation, an irrational, yet wholly explicable reaction to the flood of refugees, and their plight, which surrounds her.
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| KATALÓGUS | TARTALOM |
