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screen_memory 's review for:
Fox
by Dubravka Ugrešić
I've been contending with the idea that we as author, as speaker or writer, are incapable of offering ideas all our own, that, instead, our every word is but a thread borrowed or pulled loose from the unfathomably vast patchwork of reference - subconscious or overt - that we have been weaving all our lives. Ugresic's Fox is a novel - and here "novel", as with her Museum, exists not as indicative of narrative and structural limits, but as the delineation of the open territory spanning across where borders once stood - that embraces this idea in its opening, entitled, "A Story about How Stories Come to be Written."
Such an idea is directly influenced by Boris Pilnyak, a lesser-known Soviet author, certain of whose autobiographical details are presented in one of the book's chapters. Other Soviet writers are detailed, most of whom, if not all, will be unrecognizable to the reader. Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Vera, also figure into the novel, although the narrative focuses on Dorothy Leuthold, the woman who drove them across the country and accompanied the Nabokovs on the lepidopteral outing where Vladimir chanced upon an undiscovered species of butterfly (the Neonympha dorothea dorothea).
For Ugresic, the stories about how stories come to be written centers on those on the margins, the lesser-known's, or the completely unknown (one gets the feeling Ugresic feels herself to be such a lesser-known; such is often the fate of the exile whose works are banned or burned in their native country whose new regime has turned against them). One of the more prominent figures in her stories is Bojan, a Croatian who was living in a property Ugresic inherited from a fan of her works - a man she's never known or heard of. Bojan is a de-miner, working with a squad of people tasked with ridding the Croatian landscape of the thousands of landmines still strewn about decades after the war. Imagine, a cozy, calm house in the Croatian countryside, surrounded on all sides by landmines - all of which have been documented and marked, Bojan explains, the same Bojan who is later killed by an unmarked landmine.
Having learned of the tragic, ironic, and perhaps secretly expected death of Bojan, Ugresic, now infinitely more uncertain of the surrounding landscape, opines, "The world is a minefield and that's the only home there is."
Such an idea is directly influenced by Boris Pilnyak, a lesser-known Soviet author, certain of whose autobiographical details are presented in one of the book's chapters. Other Soviet writers are detailed, most of whom, if not all, will be unrecognizable to the reader. Vladimir Nabokov and his wife, Vera, also figure into the novel, although the narrative focuses on Dorothy Leuthold, the woman who drove them across the country and accompanied the Nabokovs on the lepidopteral outing where Vladimir chanced upon an undiscovered species of butterfly (the Neonympha dorothea dorothea).
For Ugresic, the stories about how stories come to be written centers on those on the margins, the lesser-known's, or the completely unknown (one gets the feeling Ugresic feels herself to be such a lesser-known; such is often the fate of the exile whose works are banned or burned in their native country whose new regime has turned against them). One of the more prominent figures in her stories is Bojan, a Croatian who was living in a property Ugresic inherited from a fan of her works - a man she's never known or heard of. Bojan is a de-miner, working with a squad of people tasked with ridding the Croatian landscape of the thousands of landmines still strewn about decades after the war. Imagine, a cozy, calm house in the Croatian countryside, surrounded on all sides by landmines - all of which have been documented and marked, Bojan explains, the same Bojan who is later killed by an unmarked landmine.
Having learned of the tragic, ironic, and perhaps secretly expected death of Bojan, Ugresic, now infinitely more uncertain of the surrounding landscape, opines, "The world is a minefield and that's the only home there is."