In her novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Dubravka Ugrešić explores the issues of exile and identity. The novel is a prose mosaic composed of a series of short, essayistic episodes – a collage made up of vignettes suffused with a delicate atmosphere of melancholy, sadness, nostalgia, and pain brought about by emigration and exile, the defining condition of all the fates the author touches upon. The author’s perspective is that of an exile, and most of the characters in the novel share this condition. By ironizing their situation, Ugrešić also ironizes her own position. The biographies of the characters form the core of the novel, and in writing them, the narrator simultaneously writes her own autobiography. She treats the events and characters of her time with a distinctive irony, visible through the essayistic tone of the narrative. This book, portraying exile both as destiny and as a choice, told from a female perspective, powerfully evokes the feminist slogan “the personal is political.”
