Angel Of Oblivion

(Paperback)

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This novel tells the story of a family from the Slovenian minority in Austria. The first-person narrator starts off with her childhood memories of rural life, in a community anchored in the past. Yet behind this rural idyll, an unresolved conflict is smouldering. Gradually the stories that the adults tell start to make sense. Illuminating an almost forgotten chapter of European history and the European present, Angel of Oblivion deals with family dynamics scarred by war, all told in Maja Haderlap's lyrical prose.

Reviews

2017 PEN America Translation Prize winner

"Searingly lyrical...Haderlap's is a significant achievement, hopefully a herald of more to come. An arresting evocation of memory, community, and suffering." Kirkus Reviews


"Haderlap plunges readers into a morass of European history..." Publishers Weekly

"is inflected with a staccato rhythma rush of present-tenseobservationthat reveals the writer to be a poetat heart...Haderlap's first-personstory is authored with the intense sensorial recollectionsof a child. The book's relevance is its articulationof the long-lasting burden of cultural andsemantic chasms thateven generations laterare farfrom resolved." Jessica Morgan,Artforum

"Along with everything else she accomplishes with this powerful work a work of historical witness, a Sebaldian descent into the depths of memory, and a brave and innovative hybrid of fiction and memoir Haderlap (and her English translator) deserve praise for breaking the silence to bring the stories of Slovenian-speaking Austrians to a much broader audience." Brendan Driscoll, in The Millions

"[Angel of Oblivion] captures nuances of fleeting emotion thanks to Haderlaps long-exercised lyric talent while also furnishing as riveting and lucid an account of the Austrian Slovenes in their suffering during and after World War II as will be found in any history book." Vincent Kling, Translation Review

"A sparkling and hugely sympathetic English translation.... Maja Haderlapis a dramaturge and a poet and her prose is full of rich poetic images and constructions. It is a profoundly beautiful and deeply upsetting novel worthy of all the prizes." European Literature Network

"Angel of Oblivionis a beautifully poetic novel about a young girl navigating the treacherous terrain between two hostile communities and two extremely burdened languages: Slovenian as a language of heroic resistance and continued humiliations suffered, and German, a way out of her stifling rural upbringing but also the language of the camps, which her Grandmother barely survived and many family members didnt." Festival Neue Literatur

"[A] painstaking and emotional account of the Slovenian-speaking minority in Austria during and after World War II." Abby Sheaffer,ChicagoNow

"Haderlaps novel seems to transcend the boundaries between languages and histories." Iga Nowicz,The Glossa

"Angel of Oblivion, with its doomed and colourful cast of real-life characters, as well as multiple cruel twists of fate, is a devastating story, never less than wholeheartedly told." Eileen Battersby,The Irish Times

"Haderlaps novel brings to mind the work of artist Anselm Kiefer ... His paintings evoke the same desolate feeling of a landscape, natural and mental, poisoned by the Holocaust. Though Kiefers art is influenced by foreign myths and symbols, there is that same idea that Maja Haderlap confronts inAngel of Oblivion: that even the generation born after the fall of the Third Reich is affected by its legacy." Devan Brettkelly, ZYZZYVA
"Haderlap delivers a powerful and affecting story about memory, identity and wartime persecution and retaliation. Inspired by the experiences of Haderlaps family and other Carinthian Slovenes (the Slovenian-speaking minority in southern Austria),Angel of Oblivionoffers a compelling character study and shines a necessary light on a small enclave and less-well known chapter of 20th-century European history...Tess Lewis has done a fine job of translating Haderlaps lucid and lyrical prose." The National(UAE)

"Angel of Oblivionis a continuous, plunging attempt to express the disorderly but urgent moment of daring to master the unmasterable. There is nothing so crass here as an arc or a redemptive release. The reader is on the hook until the end at which point the narratives underlying premises shimmer. Ron Slate, On the Seawall(blog)

"Impressive and moving" - Die Zeit

"A heart-wrenching story" - Peter Handke

"Haderlap writes in a clear yet poetic tone, in which time is a 'serene glacier' that crushes everything, all that the young protagonist at first finds wonderful and unchangeable, in its path." - Der Spiegel

"The strength of Haderlap's novel is that it stretches far back in time, in order to make the present recognisable." - Paul Jandl

"By telling her grandmother's story, the narrator finds her own, unmistakeable language, which speaks against the general urge to forget." - Deutschlandradio

Author Bio

MAJA HADERLAP is a Slovenian-German Austrian writer and translator. She studied German language and literature at the University of Vienna and has a PhD in Theatre Studies. Between years 1992 and 2007 she worked as drama supervisor at the Klagenfurt City Theatre and was editor for the Carinthian Slovene minority literary magazine Mladje. Haderlap writes poetry, prose and essays in both Slovenian and German. Her work has been published in numerous international literary journals and anthologies. She was awarded the Ingebjorg-Bachmann-Preis and the Rauriser Literaturpreis for her debut novel Engel des Vergessens (Angel of Oblivion). TESS LEWIS is a translator of German and French. She has been awarded translation grants from PEN America & UK, an NEA Translation Fellowship, and a Max Geilinger Translation Grant for her translation of Philippe Jaccottet. She is an Advisory Editor of The Hudson Review and writes essays on European literature for numerous literary journals.