Self-Disclosing Days

Jenny Turner

• Holograms of Fear by Slavenka Drakulic, translated by Ellen Elias-Barsaic and Slavenka Drakulic
  Hutchinson, 184 pp, £13.99, January 1992, ISBN 0 09 174994 8
• Revolution From Within by Gloria Steinem
  Bloomsbury, 377 pp, £14.99, January 1992, ISBN 0 7475 1006 7
• How we survived Communism and even laughed by Slavenka Drakulic
  Hutchinson, 193 pp, £15.99, January 1992, ISBN 0 09 174925 5

‘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 sort of stuff, but to find it personally and politically useful. And this presumably is why North American feminist figureheads of the stature of Barbara Ehrenreich, Alice Walker, Gloria Steinem and Robin Morgan have given it their impeccably feminist imprimatur.