Categories: book-review
Tags: book review
Date: 09 November 2008 16:52:08
This book is not an academic book, but is regularly referenced in a lot of the academic literature I’ve been reading for my PhD. Drakulic is Croatian, a journalist, and this is an account of the early years after the fall of communism in eastern Europe, from the perspective of ordinary women. She doesn’t look at things like political representation or the other things that academics write a lot about, but instead looks at ordinary things like washing and makeup and toys and toilet paper and all that sort of thing, and how women dealt with the everyday privations and poor quality stuff and the differences between political rhetoric and everyday lived reality during the communist times. Because she’s a journalist the book isn’t written in academese, but is very readable and really insightful, in my opinion. It gave me a couple of thesis-related lightbulb moments, and also challenged me as a Westerner about the extent to which I might romanticise the east and essentialise the people there. Those are really important things for me to think about while I’m writing my thesis.
I liked her final conclusions – after going through her grandmother’s drawers and finding loads of hoarded food (in various states) and carrier bags and suchlike, she talks about how communism ultimately failed in that it never managed to impart the hope that life would ever be better under this system, people lived with constant expectation of shortage and never seemed to have the belief and hope in the system that was constantly proclaimed by the propagandists. She also talked about communism (or perhaps more accurately a mindset of dealing with living in a communist system) remaining in the mind even after the actual political system fell, so that actually life didn’t change very dramatically despite what you might think having seen the dramatic events across eastern Europe at the end of 1989. I’m not paraphrasing it very well (the book is currently at the other end of the country from me, so I can’t do any better at the moment), but anyway I would recommend it as an insightful, challenging read but very readable – I had it recommended to me by a Romanian woman I interviewed last year during my fieldwork, she certainly recognised something of a universal experience there, and having lived in Romania only a few years after 1989 the insight about communist (and survival/coping) mindsets persisting into the 90s was certainly something I recognised, albeit as an outsider.
I'd be really interested to read a similar type of book from a man's perspective, but am not aware that any have been written. That's a shame - I think something like that could be really very illuminating and helpful for the many (feminist and otherwise) academics still writing about communist and post-communist social life and lived experience.