Book description
Europe is still a divided continent. In the place of a fallen Berlin
wall, there is a chasm between the East and the West. Are these
differences a communist legacy, or do they run even deeper? What divides
us today? To say simply that it is the understanding of the past, or a
different concept of time, is not enough. But a visitor to this part of
the world will soon discover that we, the Eastern Europeans, live in
another time zone. We live in the twentieth century, but at the same
time we inhabit a past full of myths and fairy tales, of blood and
national belonging, and the fact that most people are lying and cheating
or that they have the habit of blaming others for every failure...'
An intimate tour of life on the streets of Budapest, Tirana, Warsaw and
Zagreb, as those cities continue to acclimatise to the post-Communist
thaw, Café Europa does not provide easy solutions or furnish political
pallatives. Rather as a Croatian with a viewpoint of ever-widening
relevance, the value of Slavenka Drakulic's wry and humane observations
lie in the emotional force of their honesty and the clarity of their
insight..... Slavenka Drakulic was born in Croatia in 1949, is a
writer and journalist whose two novels and three non-fiction books have
been translated into major European languages. She contributes to The
New Republic, La Stampa, Dagens Nyheter, Frankfurter Runschau and the
Observer.
