A displaced person strives to keep memories alive

"The Museum of Unconditional Surrender," by Dubravka Ugresic, translated by Celia Hawkesworth, New Directions, 238 pages, $25.95.

By Carlos Cunha, Standard-Times staff writer

Reviewing this book seems redundant. Intricately self-reflecting, it pretty much reviews itself as it goes, being a work of criticism as much as of anything else: fiction, memory, journalism, poetry, semiotics.

It begins, at certain points continues, then ends with a journal of the author's stay in Berlin. In between there is a memoir of her mother mixed with lyrical flashes of childhood; vignettes and very short stories set in other places where the author has spent time as an itinerant academic; and a pseudo-magic realist sequence dealing with the break up of a circle of friends in her homeland of Yugoslavia.

And running through it all is a displaced person's preoccupation with biography, with its pathetic loss and often ersatz recovery, and the non-literary forms this can take.

The author seems especially taken with the biographical value of artless family-album photographs and of the conceptual-art collages and installations which, to judge from her journal, everyone she knew in Berlin seemed to be making and which her own book verbally resembles -- as much as it verbally resembles a photo album, a museum and just about every other thing it is concerned with and makes a motif of.

The book's nature and construction is explicitly supplied with a metaphor in its preface, in the description of a Berlin zoo museum exhibit of the unlikely and disparate objects of everyday human use found in the stomach of a deceased walrus.

Other than the fact that the objects were all ingested, if not digested, by the omnivorous walrus, nothing links them to each other. But the visitor, writes the author, "cannot resist the poetic thought that with time the objects have acquired some subtler, secret connections."

The book, she suggests, should be read in the same way: If the reader feels that there are no meaningful connections between its chapters and fragments, "let him be patient: the connections will establish themselves of their own accord."

But the author is being disingenuous. Far from allowing the connections to establish themselves, she takes great pains to establish them herself.

To read this book is to be continually overcome by deja vu. It is a book of echoes and reflections. What occurs first as a subject repeatedly recurs as a motif or metaphor, often felicitously but occasionally with the contorted air of having been superimposed during revision.

I'm not sure that the author need have made her stitching so intricate. No doubt there are readers, critics and academics who love that supposedly clever sort of fussing, but I tend to consider it superfluous, mere music and embellishment in spite of its pretensions to poetic significance.

In the end what truly holds this book together is its concern with irrecoverability. Ms. Ugresic reveals herself to be a writer with a profound Virginia Woolf-like sensitivity to life's slipperiness, to the pathos of our attempts to find and hold onto and cope with the inevitable loss not only of what is supposedly good and beautiful in life but of its memory and the things that aid that memory.

The title refers to a Russian museum in Berlin commemorating the surrender of Germany. In the closing chapter of the book, the author's journal often returns to this museum, in the coffee shop of which a group of her compatriots have taken to meeting -- which seems to her appropriate since they have themselves become museum pieces, representing a country destroyed by war.

But the unconditional surrender to which she is truly alluding is that which we all eventually have to make: to aging, disillusion, forgetfulness, insignificance, death: the unconditional surrender of life.