The Ministry of Pain - by Dubravka Ugresic (Paperback)

From the Back Cover

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.

Review Quotes

"Splendidly ambitious...She is a writer to follow. A writer to be cherished." - Susan Sontag
"Ugresic must be numbered among what Jacques Maritain called the dreamers of the true; she draws us into the dream." - New York Times
"Like Nabokov, Ugresic affirms our ability to remember as a source for saving our moral and compassionate identity." - Washington Post
"Soulful, often searing...This is a work that comes from the gut, one that deserves to be read." - New York Times Book Review
"This sorrowful tale packs a powerful punch." - Booklist
"Ugresic explores the cultural and personal fallout from the disintegration of Yugoslavia in this searing novel about exiled Croats, Serbs and Bosnians." - New York Times Book Review
"The Ministry of Pain is a shiningly weird and powerful novel...[it] approaches perfection." - Washington Post
"The Ministry of Pain is a masterly novel...Sartre's Nausea meets Hadke's A Moment of True Feeling and Sontag's Death Kit, except these characters have been genuinely traumatized; their wounds are real instead of philosophical." - Harper's Magazine
"[A] powerful novel of ideas." - Time Out New York
"The Ministry of Pain is a masterly novel." - Harper's Magazine
"This edgy, extraordinary novel . . . offers universal insights into what it is like to lose home, nationality and language." - The Sunday Times (London)
"Ugresic's cunning, subtle technique is at its most powerful here." - The Independent (London)
"Ugresic's books contain some of the most profound reflections on culture, memory and madness you will ever read." - The Independent
"[The Ministry of Pain] is a disturbing read that should have you in its thrall." - The Times (London)
"The Ministry of Pain is possessed of a wonderful, clear simplicity . . . [this] is a brave, accomplished, cultured novel." - The Guardian (London)