The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender -- by the renowned Yugoslavian writer Dubravka Ugresic -- begins in the Berlin Zoo, with the contents of Roland the Walrus's stomach displayed beside his pool (Roland died in August, 1961). These objects -- a cigarette lighter, lollipop sticks, a beer-bottle opener, etc. -- like the fictional pieces of the novel itself, are seemingly random at first, but eventually coalesce, meaningfully and poetically.Written in a variety of literary forms, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender captures the shattered world of a life in exile. Some chapters re-create the daily journal of the narrator's lonely and alienated mother, who shops at the improvised flea-markets in town and longs for her children; another is a dream-like narrative in which a circle of women friends are visited by an angel. There are reflections and accounts of the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Civil War; portraits of European artists; a recipe for Caraway Soup; a moving story of a romantic encounter the narrator has in Lisbon; descriptions of family photographs; memories of the small town in which Ugresic was raised. Addressing the themes of art and history, aging and loss, The Museum is a haunting and an extremely original novel.