If It Happened Here
American Fictionary by Dubravka Ugresic, translated by Celia Hawksworth and Ellen Elias-Bursac. Open Letter Books, 2018, $15.95 paper.
TO VISIT a country that is not your own and then to pass judgment on it in print is an aggressive act. Travel writers, writes Dubravka Ugresic, are “clandestine conquerors”; tourists are “innocent colonizers.” Yet to have the provincializing opera glass turned upon us is a thrill, fascinating because of its rarity, for narcissistic, casually hegemonic America—the king coolly regarded by the cat. Wow, our recorded voice sounds nothing like it does in our head!
is a revised, reissued edition of a book which in 1994 “appeared for an instant and then breathed its last, like a mayfly,” under the title . It is a diary of Ugresic’s exile from her native Zagreb during the period of the Balkan wars, when she lived in Amsterdam, New York City, and “harmless Middletown” (via an appointment at Wesleyan). If one counts their original incarnation as a column for a Dutch newspaper,
