Europe in Sepia
Ugresic would make a great friend. In this collection of 23 essays, some just a few pages, many much longer, and grouped under three headings—“Europe in Sepia,” “My Own Little Mission,” and “Endangered Species”—she is always up to something, traveling to conferences and festivals, looking for New York City’s Zuccotti Park, explaining what it is exactly that pulls the thread so that “reality, like a woolen jumper, unravels before our eyes.” In this essay, “Mice Shadows,” she posits it is sometimes simply a noise, perhaps “the shattering of a porcelain cup ringing out like a child’s scream.” Ugresic, a Yugoslavian (with “Yugonostalgia”) living in Amsterdam, is often laugh-out-loud funny, yet she also considers, say, English rioters’ literacy rates, the imprisoned former Croatian president “whining” about the violation of his dignity, the angst-y despair of contemporary “sensitive” people, writing and what sells, and more. The author of both fiction (Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, 2010) and essay collections, including the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Karaoke Culture (2011), Ugresic is a fascinating thinker and admirably, delightfully game. --Eloise Kinney