Caroline Moorehead
The Language of Exile
The Ministry of Pain
By Dubravka Ugresic (Translated by Michael Henry Heim)
Saqi 240pp £9.99 order from our bookshop
Anthropologists, it seems, have coined a term to describe what happens when an emigrant, apparently well adjusted to life in a foreign country, is abruptly consumed by an overwhelming need to go home. They call this individual a ‘sleeper’, after the word used for dormant spies in Cold War novels, ready to respond to a sudden command. Some of these awakened emigrants return precipitately to the countries of their birth, though few remain there, choosing exile once again. Others never make the journey, but prefer to inhabit parallel lives, projecting their pasts onto the screens of their new identities.
Tanja Lucic, the heroine of Dubravka Ugresic's new novel, The Ministry of Pain, is not yet a sleeper, in that she has come to uneasy terms with her condition of exile, at least for the moment. But it is the particular bleakness of her rootless life, the sense of not
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'As it starts to infect your dreams, you realise that "Portal 2" is really an allegory of the imaginative leap: the way in which we traverse the space between distant concepts, via the secret conduits we place within them.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony
'Any story about Eden has to be a story about the Fall; unchanging serenity does not make a narrative.'
@suzifeay reviews Jim Crace's 'eden'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/trouble-in-paradise
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf