Cafe Europa

Slavenka Drakulic

Slavenka Drakulic is a journalist who wants to have it both ways. Near the beginning of this book of 25 short essays she covers the 1995 Cheltenham literary festival where she was invited to speak about the situation of writers in Eastern Europe following the collapse of communism. She writes about how unhappy she was to be lumped together with Romanians, Albanians, Poles, Bulgarians and others as if they were a uniform group. And yet Slavenka Drakulic has made a career out of writing about the Eastern European situation and the post-communist experience. This book is itself an example of that and her earlier books dealt with similar subjects.

Having got that criticism out of the way there is much to enjoy in this book. She writes in a clean and simple style and each essay is no more than a few pages long.

Her subjects are wide-ranging. She reports from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, Albania and the countries of the former Yugoslavia. Her theme is the longing there is in these countries for "Europe"; the prosperous, relaxed Europe that Germans, Swedes, Italians and the rest of us take granted. Symbolic of this are the hundreds of western-style coffee bars ("Cafe Europa" is a favourite name) which have sprung up in Tirana, Sofia, Bucharest and Zagreb. She points out that she has yet to come across a self-styled "Cafe Europa" in any EU country, other than one dingy example in Vienna.

But the bravest and rawest articles deal with Croatia (where she was born) and Serbia. Her attacks on Croatia's current political atmosphere, on its failure to come to terms with its fascist period in the war and on its slightly ludicrous founder, the late President Tudjman, are quite stinging. I would imagine she has made enemies at home.

In the communist period Yugoslavs were allowed to travel, unlike Poles, Hungarians and the rest. If you were forced to choose a country in Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s most likely you would have picked Yugoslavia. And if you had to choose where in Yugoslavia you would quite possibly have picked the North-East corner, with western shops and goods just a quick car drive away over the border in Italy. Drakulic's roots are in this north-eastern tip of the old Yugoslavia and perhaps it's this proximity to the border which has given her her keen eye for what it has meant over the years to belong to the East versus belonging to the West.