The Ministry of Pain

by: Dubravka Ugresic; Translated by Michael Henry Heim

Published by: Ecco 7/Harper Perinnel

Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart

The Washington Post called Dubravka Ugresic’s The Ministry of Pain “a shiningly weird novel…[it] almost reaches perfection.”

Well, I don’t know about the perfection nor the weird part, but The Ministry of Pain gives the reader something to think about. The author and the protagonist are both from Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Protagonist Tanja Lucic winds up at the University of Amsterdam as a professor of literature teaching “Yugonostalgia” to a group of other Yugoslav exiles.

The novel is broken into five parts and none seem to find what I think of as structure. They are only connected by the characters and how they deal with their identities. The main focus is Lucic and her abilities to cope in a new environment.

The Ministry of Pain gets is title from the fact the Lucic’s students work in S&M sweatshop that they call “the ministry”–but there is little mention of it in the book. In fact, the reader never sees the students working in it, and it is only identified in a few narratives paragraphs.

The Ministry of Pain made me feel a little on the stupid side. I’m not familiar with that part of the world and had to get an atlas to located the places Ugresic mentions over and over. That was hard for me. On the other hand, I wondered what it must be like for emigrants in the world, especially for the wave of immigrants who came to America. Of course, that seems to be by choice. However, what must it feel like to consciously obliterated your language, heritage, culture and everything that made you, say Italian, Jewish, German, Albanian, Hungarian, Russian, and forever on to be “American”?

I think that’s that The Ministry of Pain does. It gives the reader a sense of what it must be like to have to fit in somewhere else when you don’t want to and re-define your very existence. This is a heavy novel in what it poses to the reader. And I guess that’s the plan. If the story doesn’t entertain, then at least it creates thought.

Armchair Interviews agrees.