The Ministry of Pain

#188
Title: The Ministry of Pain
Author: Dubravka Ugrešić
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Year: 2005/2007
Country: Croatia (former Yugoslavia)
 265 pages

The protagonist, Tanja, a literature professor, has fled the breakup of Yugoslavia, as have the students she now teaches in Amsterdam. Since the students all actually know the language (and are taking the class for a variety of other reasons), she uses her time with them to engage in "Yugonostalgia," an invocation or alchemical recreation of their memories of their former country. However, as is also the case for their fragmented nation(s), she and the students understand their relationship, purposes, and  ties to their origins differently. The Ministry of Pain works well as a novel of longing for a romanticized past, of exile and dislocation, and of existential loneliness. It is occasionally derailed by abstract socio-political passages that read more like mini-manifestos than anything else, though one could argue that they are exactly how Tanja would think under these circumstances. Quite aside from its cultural content, this is a fun read for academics for reasons similar to those found in Smiley's Moo.