Name: Prišleki
Price: 25 EUR
Availability: SoldOut
ISBN: 9789612421175

Newcomers

Prišleki

Lojze Kovačič

Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 1984
Number of pages:: 1093
Rights sold:: Croatia (Alfa), France (Editions du Seuil), Greece (Vakxikon), Italy (La nave di Teseo), Netherlands (van Gennep), Spain (Ediciones Siruela), USA (Archipelago Books)
Available reading materials:: English pdf, French pdf, German pdf, Italian pdf

This three-part autobiographical series begins in 1938 with the expulsion of the Kovačič family from their home in Switzerland and their settlement in the father’s home country of Slovenia, then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It is narrated by a ten-year-old boy, a perennial outsider, a boy who never fits in, either in Switzerland or Slovenia and is viewed with suspicion by adults and peers alike. The work includes haunting, deeply thought-provoking descriptions of this isolation as seen through the eyes of the child – in many ways a naïve boy, yet one who was forced to become an adult at an early age.
Newcomers is Kovačič’s central work on the vortex of World War II and the post-war period, covering all the political, ideological and social conflicts of the 20th century and standing as a tragic chronicle of the recent past. A canonical, extensive and difficult autobiographical work, it is considered a liter ary masterpiece of the 20th century and often compared to the oeuvres of popular modern authors such as Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgård, as well as classic authors like Nabokov and Tolstoy.

Župančič Award 1986

Chosen as the best Slovenian novel of the 20th century by Slovenian literary critics in a 2000 survey

Lojze Kovačič is probably the most important Yugoslav writer you’ve never heard of. And probably one of a handful of the most important Yugoslav prose writers and novelists, period. ... [He] is one of the most important writers of our time, one who confirms our world in both text and deed.

writer Miljenko Jergović for Croatian daily Jutarnji list
Newcomers is an emblem of what memory — personal memory, political memory, a place’s memory — can create from erasure … Curiously hypnotic. Between the fetishized ordinariness of Karl Ove Knausgård and the theater of Elena Ferrante, Kovačič unfurls a ream of anecdotes and character descriptions, rambling, yet tightly told chronology of his family’s undeserved perdition as they descend deeper and deeper into moral and literal penury.

Los Angeles Review of Books
... this work achieves the panoramic effects of H.G. Adler’s Shoah trilogy by way of Joycean stream of consciousness.

Wall Street Journal
A powerful chronicle of conflict and upheaval within both a family and a country, as told, and experienced, by a young, engaging, clearsighted boy … Kovačič skillfully depicts a tough, nomadic, hand-to-mouth existence in a city gripped by ethnic tension, rampant nationalism and the threat of war … This fine novel is not only accessible, but deeply memorable.

Star Tribune
Newcomers attests to the sum of these disruptive forces and deserves recognition alongside the work of Sebald and Ugrešić in its sophisticated treatment of exile and displacement. Yet it also stands on its own in Kovačič’s masterful reconstruction of a former self—a child’s consciousness.

Quarterly Conversation

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