[In the following review, Hughes discusses Holograms of Fear in context of Drakulic's essays in How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.]

Images of death and decay haunt Holograms of Fear, a novel which focuses on a woman's thoughts before and after a kidney transplant operation in a hospital outside New York. The operation goes well, so why is she afraid? Why does the word “recovery” always appear in inverted commas? The answer emerges through flashbacks to the patient's home in Zagreb, to memories, tender and guilt-ridden, of her grandmother, mother and daughter, and of her own younger self growing up in post-war Yugoslavia, of fellow dialysis patients, including her father, and a woman friend who commits suicide, her indecisiveness embodied in a bowl of underwear left to soak overnight. The narrative shifts between countries and decades, and between the narrator's “two realities”, her “two living halves multiplying like amoeba”, as blood pulsates through veins or the tubes of a dialysis machine, drips from wounds and gushes from slashed wrists. Before the operation there is her sick self and her well self, which she tries unsuccessfully to keep apart; after it, there is a waking self and a “nightmare Me”. She shuns mirrors in order to avoid the “terror of not recognising myself”. The divisions are healed only in the closing pages. This is assured writing, even in translation, which works on many levels, not least that of political metaphor: the security of the hospital that no one can leave, but where the patients “never have to be responsible for anything”; the difficulty of freely drinking water, once strictly rationed under the regime of dialysis.

Slavenka Drakulić, a best-selling Croatian author and journalist, published her novel in 1987, too soon, it seems, to reflect today's fast-changing realities, but reading it in conjunction with her essays in How We Survived Communism—which covers the period from the 1950s to the present and includes a chapter on the anticipated outbreak of civil war in Yugoslavia—gives immediacy to the metaphors and reveals that much of the material in Holograms is autobiographical. I suspect that for many Western women who have travelled frequently in Eastern Europe one of the most hateful aspects of communist regimes is their neglect of the needs of women. Drakulić pulls few punches on this topic. In front of a scholarly audience in New York she holds up a Tampax and a sanitary towel (unavailable even today to many East European women) as symbols of communist failure: A smart American feminist who requests a “critical theory” of women's influence on “public discourse” in Yugoslavia is rebuked for asking the wrong questions. Drakulić warns against applying a First World ecological philosophy to Third World (ie, East European) women, to whom self-denial for the sake of “higher goals” is all too familiar. She seems to hint that, for now, feminism is as inappropriate as ecology in countries where it is hard simply to blame men, “because we all live in the same mess”.

Men feature only incidentally, both in the essays and the novel, as does politics, which is likened to “a disease, a plague, an epidemic”. Instead of political or sociological analysis, Drakulić deploys the “small everyday things” to create a powerful picture of what it felt and feels like to be a woman in Eastern Europe: a new washing machine decorated with an embroidered towel, shown off to guests but not used; hard, brownish “Golub” toilet paper; the peasant woman who fainted at the sight of twenty different kinds of sausage; a first banana consumed complete with skin; babies poisoned by imported milk powder sold past its sell-by date: “hundred-ways potato parties”. Women talk about their lives, sitting amidst the steam from homemade soup (itself a symbol of “security”) in tiny kitchen havens in Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest and Zagreb, the streetlights outside shedding a “scant yellowish light” in cities killed by decades of indifference to public space. The former USSR was not included in the author's itinerary, but Moscow and Petersburg could be added to her list of cities.

From these images emerges a powerful composite portrait, alternately harrowing and humorous, of East European women, which is enriched by constant cultural cross-references. Foreign sweet papers are like “messages from another world”, a copy of Vogue is a “pebble from Mars”, a fur coat in a New York junkshop—“an illusory ticket to your dreams”. The collection ends with a description of grandmother's store cupboard, “a museum of communist shortages”, the contents of which express distrust of the system more eloquently than any tapped phone conversation or dissident leaflet, and probably say more about communism than a dozen books by sociologists or political scientists.