Books that help understand Zagreb, Croatia, and the long arc of the country's 20th century.
Baba Yaga Laid an Egg — Ugrešić, a former Zagreb academic who left Croatia under nationalist pressure in the 1990s, wrote this novel in three loosely linked parts braided around the Slavic folklore figure of Baba Yaga. The opening section is a daughter caring for her ageing mother in Zagreb; the second is a trio of old women at a Czech spa; the third a learned essay on the Baba Yaga myth. Funny, wise, and full of details of the city as it was in the post-war decades.
Café Europa: Life After Communism — Drakulić is Zagreb's most internationally translated essayist, and Café Europa — a series of short pieces written in the late 1990s — captures the strange, half-arrived condition of post-Yugoslav Croatia better than anything else of its period. The book moves between Zagreb cafés, Vienna, Bucharest, and Berlin, watching ordinary people in former communist countries trying to assemble what comes next. Funny, unsentimental, indispensable for anyone trying to understand the country.
The Return of Filip Latinowicz — Krleža is the giant of Croatian 20th-century literature — a Habsburg-era leftist, friend and then antagonist of Tito — and this 1932 novel is his most accessible to outside readers. Filip Latinowicz, a painter returning to Croatia after twenty years abroad, walks the streets of an unnamed but unmistakable Zagreb and grapples with provincial inertia, family secrets, and the cul-de-sac of Central European modernism. A more literary, demanding way into the city than guidebook prose.