Museum of Unconditional Surrender

[Gail]

Published in 1996 this remarkable book, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, catalogues and archives brief impressions, short stories and personal narratives that come together to form a very intimate impression of what it is like to be exiled from a homeland which no longer exists. The author Dubravka Ugrešić was born in Yugoslavia which after the civil war in which Yugoslavia was pulled apart into multiple ethnically dominated states she became a Croatian. She left for political reasons.
The book is considered to be a novel but reads like a collection of stories and narratives of a person in exile. Sometimes the narrator seems to be the author, sometimes the author's mother and sometimes a separate entity who is perhaps the main character of the "novel". As this narrator is never clearly defined, we don't know if this is one person or a collection of people and it does not matter. The book manages to be one whole because the voice of the narrator is so solidly consistent in focus even if what she is focused on are scraps, pieces, left overs of a life that she and other exiles had. In addition, life going forward, looking ahead is seen through the lens of knowing there is no past to go back to. There is no reason to accumulate furniture that will be given to another generation, but perhaps there is a reason to have a chair that will serve as a flag on the roof because it is Danish.
The narrator talks to other artists about accumulating rubbish, impressions, and things lost.
The narrator largely lives in Berlin and Berlin is a city that has both lost itself and found itself. Russian soldiers left East Berlin with strange monuments to loss. Jewish graves are numbered on bricks hidden under a public plaza. Buildings lost to bombing in WWII have plagues here and there to say where they were. Refugees in Berlin rebuild their communities from Turkey and Bosnia and other former Yugoslavian states on the edges of German urban centers.
Ugrešić constructs a collection of verbal photographs, to use her phrase, to investigate what exactly autobiography and fiction may share, for example; how chance objects and chance encounters make up a life and a novel. She also constructs through memories and brief glimpses of forgotten memories what autobiography and fiction narrators may share.
I found the book strangely comforting and rich although largely the tone and atmosphere of the book is about loss. The book was also extremely easy to read as I felt as if I was reading someone's private diaries or notebooks which is a fascinating way to learn about someone even if there is little plot and even less real drama.
5 stars

[Amanda]

I figured this book was going to be something special when the prologue is just a list of things found in the stomach of a walrus who lived in a German Zoo. The explanation of how the novel is like this blurb about the walrus because all of these unrelated things end up forming one picture together was great. It is through a lot of seemingly disjointed stories, lists, experiences, etc that we get a total picture of what life is like as a Yugoslavian exile.

I thought some of the strongest parts were the ones that touched on the Holocaust, the idea of the museum itself, the parts with the narrator's mother oh, and I was also partial to the piece about the angels. In particular, I just was really tickled pink by the part where the mother is listening to an interview with Peter Handke and she keeps making fun of him for saying some really clueless things about the nature of women that he clearly thinks is profound. Having read a decent amount of Handke thanks to this list and being thoroughly unimpressed by it and the fact that he won a Nobel recently I took way too much delight in that part.

Overall I found this book to be imaginative, unique, and touching and I gave it 4 stars.

[Rosemary]

A novel of exile, split into short scenes or vignettes within long sections. The unnamed narrator witnesses the breakup of her Yugoslavian communist nation and leaves before the Balkan war of the 1990s, but is profoundly affected by that war all the same. The book feels very autobiographical, but I have no way of knowing to what extent it really is.

I found it intriguing but alienating - perhaps that is part of the atmosphere of the book, since the narrator never seems able to settle anywhere.

[Patrick]

Pre-2016 review:

*** 1/2

A novel about exile, its loneliness, its efforts to fit in a new world and the power of memories of long past days, seen through the experience of a mother who migrated from Bulgaria to Croatia after World War II and of her daughter, who migrated to Germany in the midst of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Using various narrative techniques to create a mosaic of smaller stories, it felt like flicking a pile of old and recent photographs. It hit a special chord within me, as I myself am an exile of sorts, although in very different circumstances.