SOURCE: Jablow, Valerie. “No Place Like Home.” Women's Review of Books 17, no. 6 (March 2000): 1-3.

In the following review, Jablow discusses Drakulic's S: A Novel about the Balkans and Dubravka Ugresic's The Museum of Unconditional Surrender.

If truth, as the saying goes, is the first casualty of war, the second surely is the idea of home. In their native Croatia, Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić have paid an enormous price for their literary survival. Both were born in 1949, when Yugoslavia and its republics were just picking themselves up after the Nazi occupation during World War Two. Both grew up under Tito's brand of communism. Both became leading writers of nonfiction as well as fiction that challenged the status quo in their homeland. As such, both moved in a circle of intellectuals, admired and feared for their subversive potential in a state where media control and antifeminism were the...