Patrik Ourednik’s Europeana : A Brief History of the Twentieth Century

by Lily Hoang

Big Other, November 23, 2009

The twentieth century boiled down to painstakingly concise and shocking truths. No one is left unscathed or uncriticized in this book. Ourednik’s dry humor pairs well with sentences that are dense in their simplicity, that makes sense. For instance : “Psychiatrists said that in many people the First World War provoked traumas that had been previously hidden in the unconscious, and in the 1920s and 1930s the people started to be neurotic because they were not adapted to their inner or outer state, and in Europe in the 1960s, 25% of women and 15% of men were neurotic, and journalists called it the disease of the century. And in the 1970s the number of people suffering from depression also started to rise, and at the end of the century every fifth citizen of Europe was depress”. Every sentence in Europeana reads this way : biting, revealing, absurd, contradictory, a slap across an entire century’s big sweaty face.