Guarding Hanna

(Paperback)

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"Guarding Hanna" is a brilliant absurdist black comedy that relentlessly pokes and prods at the human condition while never losing sight of the humanity of its characters. The hero of this anti-drama drama is the novel's unnamed narrator who views himself as the epitome of ugliness. Abandoned at birth because of his deformities, the only family he has ever known has been that of a local Berlin gang. The patriarch of the gang, Maestro, has taken on the father role for our hero, while employing him to collect debts and otherwise perform general thuggish tasks for the gang.Except for the brief moments when he interacts with the gang or its debtors, our hero spends his life alone, walking Berlin's streets and sleeping in one of the city's vast housing projects. This will all change in a flash when one of Maestro's sons is implicated in a crime that could put him away for good. Maestro's only hope in saving his son lies in the testimony of the beautiful but eccentric Hanna Woyczik, the sole witness to the crime.Maestro calls on his 'beast' to move in with and protect Hanna until the trial. But having never spent more than five minutes in a social situation with any human being - never mind a woman - he quickly finds the basic tasks of human interaction and social intercourse - such as conversing, eating, and shopping for toilet paper and aspirin - insufferable, and within hours of entering Hanna's life, the question becomes, 'Who is protecting whom And as the week progresses and the threats to Hanna's life mount, the more vital questions become, 'And from whom Or what'

Reviews

"In ... Guarding Hanna, [Mazzini] has created a bestial protagonist ... a gargoyle of a man [who] struggles heroically with his own nature only to find that life has played him one horrific joke."
Village Voice

"[Hanna's] a wonderful creation: vulnerable, lonely, trying to keep her mood upbeat but not always succeeding. In fact, she's just the thing to melt the Beast's hostility-or drive him, with her chatter, to homicidal distraction....Throw in the narrator's grim musings on his lot in life and his occasional urge to strangle Hanna, and you have a tonic mix of menace and comedy that keeps things hopping right up to the book's twist ending."
Seattle Times

"Mazzini is a multi-talented writer. ... He is a true talent in a wide variety of writing styles, and the opening chapter of Guarding Hannah could stand alone as a short story worthy of inclusion in The New Yorker."
ArtInfo.com

Author Bio

Slovenian novelist Miha Mazzini burst onto the literary scene with the publication of his first novel, The Cartier Project, in 1987, which went on to become the all-time bestselling novel in Yugoslavia, and was awarded the Best Novel of the Year by both the state and opposition presses. Since then, as the author of over 20 books, Mazzini has become one of Slovenia's best-known writers. He has received nationwide critical acclaim in the United States for his novels Guarding Hanna (North American release 2002) and The Cartier Project (North American release 2004). Mazzini is also an award-winning screenwriter and director. His screenplay for The Cartier Project movie won the CIRCOM Award; he also wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay for Sweet Dreams Are Made of This, which received a Golden Palm at the Valencia (Spain) Film Festival and has been screened to critical acclaim throughout Europe and the United States. Mazzini lives and works in Ljubljana. He holds an MA in Creative Writing for Film and Television from the University of Sheffield and has lectured at writing and film workshops around the world. He is a voting member of the European Film Academy.