Slavenka Drakulic – författare

“She is a writer and journalist whose voice belongs to the world.” — Gloria Steinem

This essay collection from renowned journalist and novelist Slavenka Drakulic, which quickly became a modern (and feminist) classic, draws back the Iron Curtain for a glimpse at the lives of Eastern European women under Communist regimes. Provocative, witty, and intensely personal, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed cracks open a paradoxical world that through its rejection of capitalism and commoditization ends up fetishizing both.

Examining the relationship between material goods and expressions of happiness and individuality in a society where even bananas were an alien luxury, Drakulic homes in on the eradication of female identity, drawing on her own experiences as well as broader cultural observations. Enforced communal housing that allowed for little privacy, the banishment of many time-saving devices, and a focus on manual labor left no room for such bourgeois affectations as cosmetics or clothes, but Drakulic’s remarkable exploration of the reality behind the rhetoric reveals that women still went to desperate lengths to feel “feminine.”

How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed also chronicles the lingering consequences of such regimes. The Berlin Wall may have fallen, but Drakulic’s power pieces testify that ideology cannot be dismantled so quickly; a lifetime lived in fear cannot be so easily forgotten.

Europe is still a divided continent. In the place of a fallen Berlin wall, there is a chasm between the East and the West. Are these differences a communist legacy, or do they run even deeper? What divides us today? To say simply that it is the understanding of the past, or a different concept of time, is not enough. But a visitor to this part of the world will soon discover that we, the Eastern Europeans, live in another time zone. We live in the twentieth century, but at the same time we inhabit a past full of myths and fairy tales, of blood and national belonging, and the fact that most people are lying and cheating or that they have the habit of blaming others for every failure...''An intimate tour of life on the streets of Budapest, Tirana, Warsaw and Zagreb, as those cities continue to acclimatise to the post-Communist thaw, Café Europa does not provide easy solutions or furnish political pallatives. Rather as a Croatian with a viewpoint of ever-widening relevance, the value of Slavenka Drakulic''s wry and humane observations lie in the emotional force of their honesty and the clarity of their insight.....

Cu câteva zile înainte de capătul vieții, în 1954, Frida Kahlo scria în jurnal: „Sper că sfârșitul e plin de bucurie și mai sper să nu mă întorc niciodată". În Patul Fridei, Slavenka Drakulić explorează viața lăuntrică a uneia dintre cele mai excentrice artiste ale lumii, întrețesând cu pricepere amintirile Fridei în descrierea tablourilor ei și dând naștere unei meditații despre natura durerii și a creativității. Cu un personaj a cărui viață neobișnuită continuă să fascineze, această imagine a Fridei Kahlo va atrage cititorii de ficțiune și iubitorii de artă deopotrivă.