SOURCE: Schillinger, Liesl. “Hungry for His Love.” Washington Post Book World (10 August 1997): 5.

In the following review, Schillinger asserts that the theme of Drakulic's The Taste of a Man is the loss of identity that occurs when a person is consumed by love.

In her book The Balkan Express, a collection of sensitive and subversive reflections on the war in her native Yugoslavia, Slavenka Drakulic wrote that the worst aspect of war was not its carnage, or its chaos, but its relentless way of alienating people from who they used to be before the war, of estranging them from themselves. Just before Christmas in 1991, in the aftermath of the massacres in Vukovar, the author sat, impassive, in a bath in a Parisian hotel, recollecting brutal photographs of the atrocity, and watching impassively as blood seeped out of a cut in her finger. Squeezing the cut, watching the blood ooze...