[In the following review, Benn discusses the domestic frame of reference of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.]

I warn you. There is not much laughing in [How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed.] Originally commissioned as an essay in the US feminist magazine Ms., Slavenka Drakulic, one of Yugoslavia's founding feminists, has written one of the first insider accounts of what it was like to be a woman under eastern European Communism. It is neither a comprehensive nor an academic study; more, a set of connected allusions, observations and recorded conversations.

For anyone used to those fictional and journalistic accounts of eastern Europe that concentrate on the shadowy state censor, the samizdat press, the professor-forcibly-turned-window-cleaner, Drakulic's resolutely domestic frame of reference is both shocking and exhilarating. Most of her action takes place not in the street or the office but in the post office queue, and, of course, the kitchen. Her first bold chapter heading says it all: “The Trivial is Political”.

Above all, this is a book about things: about nylon stockings and soap, telephones and fur coats, tumble driers and toilet paper. (There is a whole chapter on the changing quality of toilet paper under communism.) It is also about food; people's dreams and glimpsed memories of proper pizzas, creamy chocolate, strawberries, that American bubble gum with the comic wrapping paper.

Drakulic is militant about the meaning of such items for those who have been deprived of them. She must be the first and only person to have begun a speech at a US Socialist Scholars' Conference by holding a tampon and sanitary towel aloft. “I have just come from Bulgaria where you cannot get these. Nor are they available in Poland or Czechoslovakia. Just think about it,” she said. The audience was startled into applause, but, being mostly men, were more puzzled than roused.

It is implicit in her account that women are, literally, the guardians of longing. When her grandmother died, her wardrobe was crammed with white tulle and rancid oil, shampoo and outdated insulin, each of them a reminder of a shortage endured. Hers is a story reproduced a hundred thousand times.

Yet, in both east and west, a desire for the good things of life is too commonly called envy and emptied of political content. There is a wonderful description of how it feels, in this world of shortages, to hold a copy of Vogue in your hands. It is not just the images that wound—the impossibly beautiful women with their wondrous clothes—but the paper itself, the thick silkiness of it. “I hate it,” says her Hungarian friend, Agnes. “It makes me so miserable I could almost cry.”

Traditional socialists will find this book very difficult indeed, precisely because it explores the problem of shortages, the material world, in experiential terms. This was always feminism's fraught gift to “wider” politics; so be it. Where Drakulic fails to make the experiential leap herself is in a certain inability to imagine that western women might have a Vogue problem; that they, too, might have lived long lives of barely suppressed individualised rage and envy.

More than once, Drakulic's argument reminded me of the work of British feminist Carolyn Steedman, in particular a passage in her Landscape for a Good Woman. Steedman, writing of her mother's longing for the good things of life, says that there is in Britain, as yet, “no language of desire that presents what my mother wanted as anything but supremely trivial … and yet the borders of her exclusion were immense; her loss resolutely material.”