(Dalkey Archive Press) $13.95
How can you not love a book that begins with two lines from Joseph Brodsky that read, "I sit at my desk/My life is grotesque"? I was halfway through Dubravka Ugresic's book of short, sharp essays when I realized how much I miss very tart cynicism, the kind that is so close to bitterness that reading it puts the slight taste of metal in your mouth. This is Ugresic at her best, and although her target seems almost too obvious--the degradation of the book world into a parade of personalities and how-to books, the disappearance of literature, indeed of anyone who can tell the difference between literature and just books--she earns her grumbling with brisk prose, keen observation, and some unusual argument.
She's not only willing to take an unfashionably pessimistic and moral view of culture (since it is now all the rage to find intellectual satisfaction in the lowbrow, and to dismiss cultural hierarchies as elitist), but also makes a trenchant connection between the state of literature behind the repressive iron curtain and the liberated diversity of our market-driven book world. The contemporary how-to book, in both its fiction and nonfiction incarnations, she finds, is not so different from didactic utopian socialist-realist literature; How Stella Got Her Groove Back, meet How the Steel Was Tempered. The prolific professionalism of contemporary commercial writers such as Stephen King is not far from the ideological professionalism of writers in Stalinist Russia. In letting the market rule, she finds, we have only entrenched ourselves further.
Ugresic notes the details of our decline in her literature students' "deafness to irony" and in Joan Collins' attire (Collins arrives at a book fair "dressed like a quotation: in a little pink Chanel suit"), but it is not just the stubborn and oblivious and conservative who irritate her. Ugresic is equally hard on the intellectuals who have become part of the parade of commentary on world events and culture. Her solution: Force the intellectuals to pay taxes for every lie and decorative truth with which they impress the world. One can't help but admire her bloody-mindedness: "Many of my fellow writers will ask: Why from us? Why from the most innocent, why from humanists? Because a moral tax should be levied on those who take on a moral role. So from humanists above all."
