The Ministry of Pain: A Novel

By Dubravka Ugresic

Having fled the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucic is now a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches a class filled with other young Yugoslav exiles, most of whom earn meager wages assembling leather and rubber S&M clothing at a sweatshop they call the "Ministry." Abandoning literature, Tanja encourages her students to indulge their "Yugonostalgia" in essays about their personal experiences during their homeland's cultural and physical disintegration. But Tanja's act of academic rebellion incites the rage of one renegade member of her class—and pulls her dangerously close to another—which, in turn, exacerbates the tensions of a life in exile that has now begun to spiral seriously out of control.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Nov 10, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061986093

Dubravka Ugresic

Dubravka Ugresic is the author of six works of fiction, including The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and six essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist, Karaoke Culture. She went into exile from Croatia after being labeled a "witch" for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She now resides in the Netherlands. In 2016, she was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work.

Reviews for The Ministry of Pain

[charl08-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Teaching a group of students from the former Yugoslavia, a doctor in Yugoslavian language and literatures wonders what her job means as Croatians, Bosnians, Serbians work to try and make their languages as different as possible, deny the common stories and prop up nationalistic ambition. This is the second book I've read by Ugresic and in both she led the reader quite gently at first and then the last act takes the reader into the wilds. So long as you don't mind that, a great read.At one point a student says to the teacher that they moved to the Netherlands, as how could anyone live in a country where the curses are so macabre. As if to underline the point, the book ends with two pages filled with one-liner curses.

[kant1066 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

From Mishima's "The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea" to Kafka to "Winesburg, Ohio," the themes of alienation and exile have pervaded world literature in the twentieth century so much as to almost become a cliché. The various political disintegrations in Europe of the 1980s and 1990s gave need to another wave of this type of literature, and is whence Dubravka Ugresic's wonderful novel "The Ministry of Pain" comes. Reading it, I was reminded a lot of Kundera's novels from the same time period, though Ugresic takes herself less seriously and is a much more successful ironist. While renovating an apartment she is taking in, the main character pops in a random video, and it just happens to be the film version of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being."The novel follows Tanja Lucic after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia from Zagreb to Amsterdam to take up a position teaching language, mostly to students who (like her) have left Yugoslavia and are now living in Amsterdam waiting for their papers. Living near the red light district, the name of the novel derives from the store where many of Tanja's students make ends meet constructing sex toys and other leather goods for sex-play. With a highly unorthodox approach to teaching, Tanja chooses to probe her students' "Yugonostalgia" - memories of family, language, belonging, friends, and anything else that struck them as important about a place that, technically speaking, no longer exists. Tanja figures that her students' experiences can provide an anodyne for the traumatic displacements their lives have been forced to take on. When an anonymous student reports her for not being academically rigorous enough, she is forced to engage in another teaching style (exiled from her old one?), leaving both her students and herself completely bewildered. But her teaching is really only one of the many parallel stories and musings that go on, taking the novel away from traditional, linear storytelling. Much of the novel takes place through interior monologue where she delivers poignant, sad, and sometimes witty remarks about the brokenness of language, modern culture, her thoughts about her students' writing, and even one of their suicides.Unlike in times past when the enlightened citizen-philosopher was offered in literature as the non plus ultra in relation to the modern state, Ugresic suggests that it is the exile whose fragmentation, psychic and geographic, provides new ground for understanding the self through literature. As she puts it in "Thank You for Not Reading," "The exile, like it or not, tests the basic concepts around which everyone's life revolves: concepts of home, homeland, family, love, friendship, profession, personal biography. Having completed the long and arduous journey of battling with the bureaucracy of the country where he has ended up, having finally acquired papers, the exile forgets the secret knowledge he has acquired on his journey, in the name of life which must go on." After all, exile is just another form of homecoming.

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An intelligent, witty and sometimes very moving examination of the condition of exile: what it means to come from a country that no longer exists, to have been brought up in a culture that has been split apart by nationalism and war, to find that you have become a refugee, living on sufferance in someone else's country. Ugrešić's narrator, Tanja, gets a job at Amsterdam University teaching Serbo-Croatian literature. Her students are all exiles like herself (Serbs, Croatians, Bosnians,...), who find it convenient to have student status. She tries the experiment of teaching "Yugonostalgia", getting the students to remember the pre-war Yugoslav culture that has been erased or devalued by nationalism, but finds that there are no easy answers, and that her own job at the university is in danger.