SOURCE: Brisby, Liliana. “Another False Dawn.” Spectator 277, no. 879 (19 October 1996): 52-3.

In the following review, Brisby points out inconsistencies in Drakulic's Café Europa: Life after Communism, but argues that “her critique is well worth listening to.”

In How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, a collection of essays published a decade ago, Slavenka Drakulic had a marvellous title which unfortunately she failed to live up to. The book was rather humourless and survival was irritatingly viewed mainly from a consumerist perspective: there was more about the miseries of not having proper lavatory paper than about the humiliations of being treated like a sheep by the communist rulers. As the daughter of one of Tito's partisan generals in a country reaping the benefits of the 1948 break with Stalin, she used her frequent travels to the West to train her keen journalistic eye on the contrasting experiences of women on both...