num_pages: 257
description: The Ministry of Pain tells the story of Tanja Lucic, an exile from Yugoslavia and a lecturer in Serbo-Croatian literature at the University of Amsterdam. Her class is filled with other Yugoslav exiles, not much younger than she, who have found temporary refuge in the Department of Slavonic Languages. Rather than teach literature, Tanja prods the students to reconstruct their pasts by writing essays that indulge their "Yugonostalgia" and their memories of Yugoslavia's culture and disintegration in war. Meanwhile, Tanja and her student Igor form a dangerously close relationship that threatens to unleash all the tensions of life in exile. With her sharp and melancholy observations, Dubravka Ugresic illuminates with savage compassion our shared human homelessness.
language: English
title: The Ministry of Pain
titlecomplete: The Ministry of Pain
genres: Fiction, European Literature, Politics, Female Authors, Literature, Novels, Contemporary, 21st Century, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 1842
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Independent Foreign Fiction Prize
category: Shortlist, awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Angelus
publisher: Ecco