The Feminist Book Club 2/1

10.10.2024

Dubravka Ugrešić: Forsiranje romana reke, 1988.

Dubravka Ugrešić, one of the most influential contemporary Croatian writers, was born in 1949 and died in 2023 in Amsterdam, where she had lived since the first half of the 1990s. She first began writing children's books, then short stories, and her first novel Štefica Cvek u raljama života and its later film adaptation achieved cult status. After 1990, she mainly published essays and novels. Forsiranje romana reke is her second novel and her last work to be published before the turn of the 1990s. It was published in 1988 and Dubravka Ugrešić was the first woman writer to receive the prestigious NIN award for the novel of the year. In general reviews of the author's work, this novel is often underestimated, i.e. it is read less often than her other novels. Interestingly, this novel can be seen as a specific link between the author's early poetics (usually described as postmodern, with an emphasis on intertextuality, self-referentiality and the problematization of the boundaries between high and low) and her later texts, which refer much more explicitly to specific historical and social problems.

We devoted the conversation to, among other things, the title genre and the play with the concept of genre in the collage of erotic and crime novels and the jeand prose; as well as to the way in which political themes are interwoven in certain branches of the novel, the relationship between official politics and culture and its manifestation in the behavior and habits of writers, model characters and various cultural policies, gender relations in the literary field, and various ideas about literature articulated in the novel.