Native Land Book

A scholar returns to her birthplace of Yugoslavia to attend a conference on "language and literature, feminist theory and practice" only to find herself embarking on entirely different course. Here, in her native land, she finds how it has changed?a small resort town where she once lived brings back the memory of an old lover, quince ripening on the windowsills, the heat, salt, and smell of the harbor where French tourists bathed sun-bronzed and bare. Over lunch at a seaside terrace, the differences between Anna and her American counterparts quickly become apparent: they recoil from calamari, are horrified by the cooked vegetables and scratch the just-below-the-surface hostility and disdain of the waitstaff who ridicule them, with Anna understanding every word. By association, Anna is a foreigner in her own land. We feel the tension as she visits an old disco and is mistaken for an American, taunted by young boys on the street, until she speaks her native tongue and is recognized, ?tender and sweet,? as one of theirs. Native Land is an intensely felt novel of century-long cultural differences; identity as a woman, foreigner, and native; and of coming to terms with a bittersweet past and the surreal present. Native Land is a book of new-beginnings, remembrances, and one woman?s pursuit to reconcile with her ?native land? and her new land of America. In the spirit of Marguerite Duras?s The Sailor from Gibraltar and with the involving quality and descriptions of The Lover, Tesich?s book recalls Yugoslavia as it was before the war: a land of beauty, where tourists flocked to resorts, and a place inhabited by people of grace, courage, and verve.Read More