One of the most interesting things about the book is the form. It alternates between the numbered paragraphs of Berlin and others, the first one being about her family, the second one seems not to have much in common, nor do I see in all the discreet motif of a departing angel, the third one is about the author and her Zagreb friends. In the Berlin ones, the general reflections are probably written later, but the happenings are probably in chronological order, since in the first one she says that the only German she knows is “ich bin müde” (3, 9), and in the second Berlin one she is taking German lessons 3A(97), and in the third one she is trying to order food in German in an Italian restaurant (168), and in the fourth one there is no reference to her German skills. But the restaurant lessons usually come in the fifth or so lesson, but her stay in Berlin seems to be between 1991-1996 (238), so that may not be necessarily true. In fact there was a place that mentioned to Kobe earthquake (161), which is 1995, and I remember being surprised when I saw that because I thought the narrative hadn’t reached even the 1990′s, (which shows that I was at a loss of the time of the novel.) But my point is, someone who already knows at least three languages (Croatian, English and Russian) cannot be struggling in German to order food after five years of stay.
The Berlin ones are especially interesting in terms of the form because of the repetition. 45 and 124 is exactly the same except for a little bit of addition in the 124. 10 and 107 are almost the same but the wordings are different. Some questions like “Do you have some time?” and “Was ist Kunst?” are asked to different people. The language is again also interesting because first the author asks Richard in German (160), but it may be that she actually didn’t know the word and asked Richard to practice her German, and then she started asking her friends in German but they all answer in English. Then at last she asks Richard “What is art?” to Richard in English, it seems (169).
The form of The Kinder-egg chapter (55-91) reminded me of a section from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being‘s “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words,” because of the all capitalized section title, and because this is another example of how people associates more meaning to certain words than the dictionary meanings.
One last thing about the form is that they are supposed to be in the form of a museum exhibition. And the book is exhibiting unconditional surrender(s). However I am confused now with the title because we learn that there actually was such museum in Berlin and it was a Russian museum, and the one who surrendered was Fascist Germany. I was thinking in this book the ones who surrendered were the exiles and the one who they surrendered to is either to their own country or the general force of history. If I were the author, even if I got the idea of the title from the museum I wouldn’t mention that in my novel, because then the analogue of me would be Germany, which I don’t think an exile is. Fascist Germany indeed may be exiled from the right path of history after the war, but still it doesn’t really seem to fit.
I too am interested in exploring the structure of the novel. I don’t think I fully understand a lot of the chronology and actual relationships between characters and time in this novel. I did get a very strong sense of the structure as a sort of additional symbolic layer of character and meaning from the beginning, though. I think that the book is so broken up and inconsistent (and also changes perspectives (right??)) as a reflection of the break up of Yugoslavia and the scattering of national/historical identities that happened as a result of that. The primary narrator (I can’t even figure out her name, yikes… Sara? Bubi to her mother?) is born and raised with a sense of dislocation and being pulled apart due to her parents’ histories as exiles from the Balkans, as well as just the reality of living in post-World War II Eastern Europe. This is obviously exacerbated by her own reconciliation of Slavic identity with her other identities. She struggles with what it means to found a sense of self on a heritage/nationality that is composed of layer upon layer of displacement and contrivance.
Using a museum as the framework for the story is interesting to me because so much of this book deals with the construction and retention of memory. Museums are a macrocosm of artificially produced memory, something that Ugrešić confronts more than once. While museums are supposed to be historical accounts of some history or event or time period, they are in reality the memory of the victors in any narrative, and a simplified one at that, in which objectivity is impossible because of the element of choice. Ugrešić’s titling of the novel demonstrates her awareness of this, and of the near-impossibility of conveying a story and identity contingent on so many conflicting narratives and perspectives.
I like the self-conscious discussion of biography that happens on pages 106-107:
” ‘I’m forgetting things,’ I tell them, ‘for some time I’ve been mixing everything up, I no longer know what came first and what was next, whether something happened here or somewhere else.’… ‘So how do we measure biographies?’ ‘Presumably by birth and death,’ says Zoran. ‘Start with the unimportant, perhaps that way you’ll get to what matters… the only problem is how to decide what is important and what is not,’ says Goran. ‘The problem is that there is no hierarchy: there is no ‘important’ and ‘unimportant.’ Nor is movement linear: there is no start with or get to,’ says Zoran. ” Thus, we have the Museum of Unconditional Surrender, in all its self-conscious chaotic existential crisis.
Your observation that an exhibition of a museum has a producer, which means it cannot be ‘natural’ and unfiltered, and therefore the title that contains museum suggests that the author is aware that her museum of memories is also not just an objective report but another construction is very thoughtful. Your quote also seems to suggest that the way our author wants to present the memories is not based on the importance of the events, which is how we or at least I hope that producers include in their criteria because for example it is not very interesting to see unimportant paintings when I want to learn something about impressionism. This seems to suggest something about her unconditional surrender but I’m not exactly sure what you are getting at in your last paragraph.
Another thing that you point out, I think, has been a technique in some of the recent books we have read, which is to use the structure of the novel or the tone of the narrative as another way to convey the meaning than the subject matter. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which I have been trying to write a paper on, Terry Eagleton suggests that Kundera is expressing his anti-Stalinism, not by the subject matter but the way he treat the subject matter. Stalinism is on the one hand the erasure of individual difference, but what Stalinism pretends to do is to promote the romantic idealism of happiness. So romantic idealism in itself is not anti-Stalinism. That is why Kundera’s treatment of romance is surprisingly unromantic, but still his treatment of his characters is far from the erasure of individual difference. This kind of utilizing the narrative as a vehicle of meaning is probably what is called postmodern.