Synopses & Reviews
Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmlers clandestine
Lebensborn project.
Haya reflects on her Catholicized Jewish familys experiences, dealing unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps, and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, and to eyewitness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. From this broad collage of material and memory arises the staggering chronicle of Nazi occupation in northern Italy.
Written in immensely powerful language and employing a range of astonishing conceptual devices, Trieste is a novel like no other. Daša Drndić has produced a shattering contribution to the literature of twentieth-century history.
Review
“The Ministry of Pain is a masterly novel.” Harper's Magazine
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“Soulful, often searing...This is a work that comes from the gut, one that deserves to be read.” New York Times Book Review
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“Ugresics cunning, subtle technique is at its most powerful here.” The Independent (London)
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“The Ministry of Pain is a shiningly weird and powerful novel...[it] approaches perfection.” Washington Post
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“Ugresics books contain some of the most profound reflections on culture, memory and madness you will ever read.” The Independent
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“This sorrowful tale packs a powerful punch.” Booklist
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“Splendidly ambitious...She is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished.” Susan Sontag
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“Ugresic must be numbered among what Jacques Maritain called the dreamers of the true; she draws us into the dream.” New York Times
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“Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity.” Washington Post
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“[The Ministry of Pain] is a disturbing read that should have you in its thrall.” The Times (London)
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“This edgy, extraordinary novel . . . offers universal insights into what it is like to lose home, nationality and language.” The Sunday Times (London)
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“[A] powerful novel of ideas.” Time Out New York
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"A work of European high culture...Even at their most lurid, Drndic’s sentences remain coldly dignified. And so does Ellen Elias-Bursac’s imperturbably elegant translation." –The New York Times Book Review
"A palimpsest of personal quest and the historical atrocities of war...Undeniably raw and mythical...Trieste evolves as a novel in the documentary style of the German writer W.G. Sebald, but also as a memorial of names, and as a novel about one woman's attempt to find order in her life. And as a book of events that have made the last century infamous for the ages, a book that, if it moves you as it moved me, you will have to set down now and then, to breathe, to blink and blink and say to yourself and whatever gods you might believe in, please, oh, please please please, never again." – Alan Cheuse, NPR
"Trieste…explores the 20th century’s darkest chapter in an original way, both thematically and stylistically, without ever diluting the disaster...So unflinchingly does Drndic present her detail that after certain passages concerning freight-train journeys, gas chambers and euthanasia centers, it pays to put the book down and take a break and gulps of fresh air. Potent, candid writing, while deserving of praise, is not always the easiest to digest...Trieste is an exceptional reading experience and an early contender for book of the year." –Minneapolis Star Tribune
"An extraordinarily rewarding novel...Rich." –Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"A darkly hypnotic kaleidoscope of a book...Drndic has in her own way composed an astonishment that extracts light from darkness." –The Jewish Daily Forward
"Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary. Haya's life story is woven artfully into a broader tale of the twentieth century's atrocities. The book begins gently, introducing us to the archiepiscopal see of Gorizia in a manner reminiscent of WG Sebald . . . It is a masterpiece." –A.N. Wilson, Financial Times
"Trieste achieves a factographical poetry, superbly rendered by Ellen Elias-Bursac, implying that no one in Axis-occupied Europe stood more than two degrees from atrocity." –Times Literary Supplement
"Trieste is more than just a novel, it's a document that should be compulsory reading in secondary schools ... Books like this are necessary whilst there's still a glimmer of hope that eloquently reminding us of the past may prevent its repetition." –Bookbag
"Trieste is a massive undertaking. It swings from stomach-churning but compelling testimonials from former concentration camp workers to fluid fictional prose." –Irish Independent on Sunday
"In this documentary fiction, the private and public happen at once, large and small scale, imagined with just the same biographical precision. Haya sits dazzled in the cinema, lost in the unbelievable glamour on the screen; meanwhile, neighbors are disappearing. . . . The picture Trieste offers is cumulative -- so is its effect. For a reader with a taste for tidy narrative, its wilfulness can be maddening, and yet the multifarious elements that comprise Haya's story and its grand context are an incredibly dense and potent mixture, too." –The Independent
"Trieste is a brilliant, original conceptualized novel consisting of fragmented memories and a series of concentrated history lessons that will challenge a reader with its irregular construction and seeming lack of continuity. It may not be easy but it is well worth reading and will assuredly linger in memory." –BookBrowse
"Powerful, disturbing, original...Author Dasa Drndic uses her technique with painful effectiveness." –New York Journal of Books
"Drndic’s monumental work about a hitherto rarely discussed aspect of the Holocaust, and about the ongoing consequences of fascism, is not for the fainthearted, but its seamless combination of beautifully told story and relentless harsh documentation makes for a deeply engaging and unforgettable read." –Jewish Renaissance
"A powerful and original testimony, moving and hypnotic." –Historical Novel Review
"Richly textured reminisces...Drndic's themes, use of history, and narrative technique invite favorable comparisons to W.G. Sebald." –Publishers Weekly
"Outrage, horror, and grief simmer beneath the surface of this gripping novel...An unbearable, unusual, and unforgettable tribute to a very dark period of history...Highly recommended, this story’s gripping historical approach calls to mind the work of Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo." –Library Journal, starred
"Trieste’s originality lies not just in its structure and forceful, unflinching imagery—translator Elias-Bursa deserves acclaim as well—but also in how it brings the lingering effects of the Nazis’ merciless racial policies forward into the present." –Booklist
"An epic, heart-rending saga from the Croatian novelist about a forgotten corner of the Nazi Holocaust...A brilliant artistic and moral achievement worth reading." –Kirkus, starred
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
"A masterpiece" (A.N. Wilson), this many-layered novel of WWII combines fiction with a Sebaldian collage of facts to explore the fate of Italian Jews under Nazi occupation, through the intimate story of a mother's search for her son.
About the Author
Dubravka Ugresic is the author of several works of fiction including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and several essay collections, most recently Thank You for Not Reading. She has received several international prizes for her writing. She has held positions at UCLA, Harvard University, the University of North Carolina, and Wesleyan University. Born and raised in the former Yugoslavia she left her homeland in 1993 for political reasons and currently lives in Amsterdam.