The Ministry of Pain tells the story of Tanja Lucic, an exile from Yugoslavia and a lecturer in Serbo-Croatian literature at the University of Amsterdam. I was interested in reading a story about another culture and world view that was so outside of my own. In the long run though I felt like the story didn’t really go anywhere. Dubravka Ugrešić, a literary scholar and a writer, tries to capture dolorous outcome of people trying to make a living in an alien surrounding, and her main character, Tanja Lucic, shows a similarity with the author of sharing an ideology of anti-war. Tanja’s class is filled with other Yugoslav exiles, not much younger than she, who have found temporary refuge in […]