Cafe Europa Essay

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Word Count-1117 Drakulic, Slavenka. Cafe Europa. (Great Britain : Penguin Group, 1996.). pp. 213 Café Europa In Slavenka Drakulic’s novel, Café Europa, she immerses the reader into the complex social situation of Eastern Europe. She analyzes small aspects of life that she encounters to demonstrate the dysfunction of Eastern Europe since the fall of Communism. She often compares the old Communist system to the new socialist system in positive and negative lights. Drakilic doesn’t point a finger of blame at any one person or group of people. Instead, she investigates all of the underlying causes of the chaos, which spans from the inhabitants themselves, to the government’s lack of control. She makes an effort to capture different peoples attitudes in order to expose the hierarchy system that the people sub-consciously live under. During the novel, she struggles with her own identity and attempts to understand the impact that the fall of Communism has brought forth in her life, as well as others. She also tries to recognize why the Eastern European countries have had a slow progression after the transformation of the region. One of the small aspects of life that Drakulic explores is the process of travel. She feels the need to explain how much trouble she has to go through while attempting to cross borders of Europe. The rules only allow travellers to bring certain amounts of goods into the country, which poses problems for people such a Drakulic. They don’t allow people to do so because they would rather the money be spent in their own country. Drakulic explains that it is a flawed system because many of the goods in her own country are highly inflated and overpriced compared to the goods in Western Europe. This causes smuggling to become a reality that many of the Eastern European people have to succumb to in order to survive. She tells a story in the
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