Newcomers: Book One: Book One

(Paperback)

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In sparse prose, Lojze Kovacic chronicles the refugee experience, drawing extensively on the specificities of his own flight from Switzerland for Slovakia, but ultimately transcending the prosaic to meditate on the universal experience of unsettlement. This, the first volume of a three-part semi-autobiographical series, begins with Kovacic as a ten-year-old boy chronicling his family's journey with uncanny naivety. Before leaving, he imagines his father's home country as something beautiful out of a fairy-tale, but as they get closer the reality of Slovenia dawns.

Reviews

Kovai voted the outstanding Slovenenovelist of the past twenty-five years

"Newcomerscrystallizes into a classic artist's coming-of-age story, as Bubi is drawn to painting and then writing, where, as in this rich and fascinating novel, he will search for a way to synthesize the enchantments of youth with the hard realities of the war." Wall Street Journal

"Kovai has often been compared to Proust for his ability to recapture the past, though there is something of Tolstoy in him as wellthe dense feeling of reality his work evokesand of the writer Danilo Ki, whose family cycle so richly recalls the wartime Hungary of his childhood. These are admittedly august names, but Kovai belongs in their company. Newcomers is a novel of grand and appalling power. It is a human-smelling work, slick with sweat, trembling with appetite. And deeply sad in its loneliness and privation, too. It wounds us in the way our own memories do. It is a marvelous and humane feat of clarity and consolidation." The Nation

"Like Karl Ove KnausgaardsMy Struggleand Elena Ferrantes Neapolitan Novels,Newcomersis a European saga ... that begins with the authors youth and creeps outward, describing life with a rare acuity that not only captures both its dramas and banalities, but also considers them with equal significance.Newcomersis an emblem of what memory personal memory, political memory, a places memory can create from erasure... [C]uriously hypnotic."--Los Angeles Review of Books

"Apowerful chronicle of conflict and upheaval within both a family and a country, as told, and experienced, by a young, engaging, clearsighted boy . . .This fine novel is not only accessible, but deeply memorable." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Kovacic impressively catches the mood of the early years of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The volumes are masterpieces. They are bitter, but grippingly intense in their description... Newcomers is a mnemonic sleight of hand of botanical exactitude, a weighty historical document whose significance will only grow." --Sign and Sight

"Epic and panoramic... Newcomers turns stereotypes on their heads, as novels of the century should do--stereotypes such as the dignity of rural poverty, the unifying sanctity of the Slovenian language, and the noble heroism of resistance." --Erica Johnson Debeljak, Context

"One of the major Slovenian prose writers of the last sixty years." --Words Without Borders

"In this second part of the famous Slovenian writers autobiographical novel, the narrator details the dangers and humiliations of his boyhood living in occupied Slovenia in the Second World War...Reeling from the loss of his home in Switzerland, and surrounded by a language he cant quite master, Bubi confronts the challenges and humiliations of growing up in a strange environment. Narrated with uncanny navet, the novel flits between memories of tenderness and shocking violence as Bubi navigates friendship, family, and his burgeoning sexuality in a land under hostile occupation." Translated Lit

Author Bio

In 2016,Lojze Kova_x010D_i_x010D_ was voted the most outstanding Slovenian novelist of the past quarter century by a jury of eighteen leading Slovene literary historians and critics. Archipelago's release of the first volume of his three-volume masterpice Newcomers is the first work by him to appear in English. Lojze Kova_x010D_i_x010D_ was born in Basel in 1928 to a German mother and Slovenian father. In 1938 the family was exiled to Slovenia, where Kova_x010D_i_x010D_ lived until his death in 2004. He is considered to be one of Slovenia's most significant authors, and Newcomersis widely regarded the most important Slovenian novel of the twentieth century. He received the Preseren Award for life achievement in 1973, and the Kresnik Award for best novel in 1991 and 2004 for Crystal Time and Things of Childhood. In addition to his novels and short story collections, Kova_x010D_i_x010D_ also published a number of books for children and young readers. About the Translator- Michael Biggins has translated works by a number of Slovenia's leading contemporary writers. He currently curates the library collections for Russian and East European studies and teaches in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, both at the University of Washington in Seattle.