Name: Kurji pastir
Price: 22 EUR
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Rating: 5.0000 (10 reviews)
ISBN: 9789612846367

A Herder of Hens

Kurji pastir

Feri Lainšček

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Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 2020
Number of pages:: 308
Rights available:: world
Available reading materials:: English sample translation

Feri Lainšček was born on 5 October 1959 to Terezija (Trejzka) and Štefan (Pištek) in the village of Dolenci in Goričko, a hilly part of Prekmurje, the farthest and most special corner of Slovenia, near the Hungarian border. The house he was born in was the poorest around and the child was unexpected; at 39 and 44 his mother and father were considered well on their way to old age. The boy’s sister, who was called Little Trejzka, was 18 by the time of his birth and had already left the house. The child didn’t even have a name for a while and in the end he was named by the local priest when the father went to register him for baptism. Local people said that nothing more than a herder of hens could become of the boy as there were no cattle or other animals in the household. Despite knowing that the boy grew into something much more, we still worry for him and fear for his life as we read.
A Herder of Hens is a book a writer writes only once in his lifetime. By using the method of Jung’s active imagination the author returns to his childhood and transforms it into a unique creative process. But more than autofiction, the novel has a tight-knit structure and pace that builds a suspenseful and electrifying portrait of a singular childhood that at first seems to offer the protagonist almost no chance of and at life. Of particular value are also metaphorical and symbolic language, which, intertwined with folk traditions and mythical archetypes, form a sweeping and powerful work of literature.

“I can step into my childhood any time and any place. I didn’t become a writer because I did a lot of reading, but because I did a lot of listening. Today I know that stories are the most important thing in the world.” – Feri Lainšček

Shortlisted for the Kresnik Award for best novel of the year 2021

Yes, in A Herder of Hens, Feri Lainšček is (again) a magical realist. Not just because he creates a world that is bigger than life, that is incredible, mystical, and poetic, but because this is how this world seems from a distance. When you are in the middle of what is happening, when you are in the middle of the book, it does not seem that way at all. When you fall into A Herder of Hens, when you are pulled in by the magic of the words (even if that sounds like a cliché), everything seems quite logical and right. […] Along with the novel The Woman Carried in by the Fog, I place [this work] at the very top of Feri Lainšček’s novelistic oeuvre.

Večer
The autofictional narrative, then, primarily brings us the story of the writer’s parents – his mother no longer young, his father with eyes fixed on a better life – but through the well-chosen symbolic language it also sketches out the wider community of the family and village.

Dnevnik
The scenes he describes are not big heroic stories, but ones that are not often told, which are special because of the way memory processes them. What we have here is a genuine nostalgia and a description of the closeness between two people who had to create a life for themselves almost from scratch. […] [The author] allows us to enter the intimate cosmos of his parents (as well as the wider family and the village community), but he never gives too much away. He achieves this reach from the particular to the general by looking at “everything that is” with a calm, distanced eye, thus creating a very subtle portrait – a portrait of “his own becoming”.

AirBeletrina
The writer’s modest but joyful childhood is transfigured by novelistic and genre elements into the motif of a childhood, while in the process, the view into the relations and dynamics of the family, although important, is not the most important thing. He also, and mainly, portrays the community, life, everyday struggles, and interpersonal relations of simple, ordinary people from the rural margins. The literary experiment in which the writer investigates the boundaries of his memory and searches for an answer to the question of what shaped his later view of the world, and how it was shaped, is a very valuable experience for the reader, one that holds us in expectation, stirs our curiosity about what is real and what is fiction, and encourages us to ask similar questions of ourselves.

Radio Slovenia
Feri Lainšček’s literature is like a dandelion flower that spreads its seeds of knowledge about what modern literature can do – with its charm and its didactic power, the modest search for the other, the overhearing of simple speech – and thus creates new meaning.

Ignacija J. Fridl, Slovenian literary historian