SOURCE: Merrill, Christopher. “Breaking Away.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (16 February 1997): 11.

In the following review, Merrill offers a positive assessment of Café Europa, praising the collection as insightful and engaging.

“Life, for the most part, is trivial,” Slavenka Drakulic announced in How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, her first collection of essays published in English. “But trivia is political.” The wit and candor with which she explored in those pages the relationship between political authority and the trivia of daily life in the former Yugoslavia earned her a spirited readership in the West. Here was a fresh and, more important, reliable guide to a land—terra incognita, for many—about to lay claim to the world's attention.

True, the Communist system had fallen apart, but the habits of thinking inculcated in its citizenry persisted, often in the guise of virulent nationalism. When fighting broke out in Yugoslavia...