Ficcionario americano

During the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, Dubravka Ugresic travels as a guest speaker to Middletown, Connecticut. A world away from the brutal sieges that Sarajevo was enduring and the nationalist rhetoric of Milosevic, she must face the daily life of the United States, where she is besieged by a wave of completely incomprehensible behavior. Compulsive jogging, cult of the body, unhinged networking, inappropriate confessions of intimate feelings, compelled optimism and bagel bingeing: all under the sharp magnifying glass of Ugresic, who confronts the contradictions and extravagances of American society firsthand. From the perspective of a Yugoslav refugee, the comforting veil of Western consumerism is torn away, revealing the skeleton of collective myths that silently shape the behaviors, attitudes and laws of our society.Arranged like a fictional dictionary, these incisive texts by Ugresic are as relevant now as they were when they were first published. A deep and hilarious reflection that puts on the table the miseries of the West in the face of the immediate tragedy of a people marked by dispossession and war.