Thank You for Not Reading [Paperback]

This collection of essays from the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic deals with the state of literature and the arts, the media, the condition of exile and other subjects. While a few of the essays are merely glib, most offer many interesting insights, such as the fact that it is the market, rather than communism, which has most successfully enforced the ideals of "socialist realism" in the arts; that it is the sheer volume of new books, rather than their absence, which has resulted in the death of literature. An entertaining and interesting collection - recommended.

"The literary market does not tolerate the old-fashioned idea of a work of art as a unique, unrepeatable, deeply individual artistic act. In the literary industry, writers are obedient workers, just a link in the chain of production..." - with thoughts like these and many more, Dubravka Ugresic dares to open our eyes to the shortcomings of our literary scene. She dares us to reexamine our restricted notions about what is good or bad, what is saleable and what is not, and, ultimately, what we think is worthy of our complete attention. All the denizens of Amazon's 'reviewing elite' owe her a serious read.

Many European writers craft what's called a "feuilleton," a short--maybe a thousand words--essay on a theme, often appearing in newspapers. While no information is given about the origin of these stories, only their late-90s dates, and that the collection was "originally published in Dutch", Ugresic has certainly assembled what the subtitle of her collection indicates. I cannot tell if these essays were written in her native language or in Dutch, which adds to the slight confusion I felt when dealing with these nearly thirty appetizers. If taken in small portions, she offers her thoughts efficiently.

Contrasting the plight of the literary writer with the best-selling, commodified celebrity, she gives a series of elegies or curses at what looms as the funeral of the book for the educated reader. Now, she's preaching to the converted surely, given that the fine Dalkey Archive, a doughty holdout against the Oprah book clubs and Ivana Trump-driven marketplace, publishes her own efforts. But, over the course of only 220 pages, her critique wears so thin that she sounds griping rather than analyzing.

She does warn that the "professor of literature" scolding tone does creep into these essays; I respond, though at a far more proletarian institution than the ones she teaches at: yes, "it takes one to know one." I sympathize with her position, and support it, but the limitations of the 1000-word limit that straightjackets her into repetition and frequent lack of development keeps this anthology (the fiction, by the way, is negligible in amount compared to the essays) from wholly succeeding as a study of the decline of literary fiction and belles-lettres.

Not that her comparisons lack hard-earned insight. Socialist realism and the optimism of self-help books, whether peddled in big-box retailers, on talk shows, or the glossy magazines, makes for an original thesis. She speaks movingly of exile and the manufactured status that this is supposed to confer upon the exile from the former Communist bloc. Juxtaposing Tito-era "houses of culture" in every village with the peddling of books as nostrums on TV, or women, smoking, and the sacrifices they make for the male-dominated literary elite illustrate her knack for not only clever but informative anecdotes from her own life in Yugoslavia. This element, as a Croatian who chose to flee her country once it attained independence, and once it co-opted so many of its intellectuals and fellow authors, makes for sobering reading about the seductive power that continues, after the Stalinist and Tito eras, to recruit willing propagandists who, as in the former times, subvert yet support the regime.

So, this collection makes me want to read more of Ugresic. But, a warning--unless taken in small doses, you may find this brief but too ponderous assortment of essays too much for one or two sittings. She's confident, understandably aggrieved and rather bitter, and for better and worse, this is who you contend with while hearing her insistent and rather petulant voice in TYFNR.