SOURCE: Turner, Jenny. “Self-Disclosing Days.” London Review of Books 14, no. 8 (23 April 1992): 17-18.

In the following review, Turner analyzes the relationship between Drakulic's work and Western feminism, focusing on Holograms of Fear and How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed as well as Gloria Steinem's Revolution from Within.

‘Courageous, poignant, superbly written in blood’; ‘brave, funny, wise’; ‘sensitivity, intelligence, grace … belies the huge internal struggle that leads to its poise’. Holograms of Fear, Slavenka Drakulic's first and largely autobiographical novel, is one of those tight, solipsistic, well-written memory-rambles about which there is nothing much to say. Ostensibly the story of the author's kidney transplant, it is in fact, as is sadly the convention with all too many ‘literary’ novels these days, a self-regarding show-tour of the fascinatingly sensitive inside of its author's own head. But women in general, and feminists in particular, are meant not only to love this...