Newcomers: Book Two
by Archipelago
The first volume of this three-part autobiographical series begins in 1938 with the expulsion of the Kovacic family from their home of Switzerland, eventually leading to their settlement in the father's home country of Slovenia. Narrated by Kovacic as a ten-year-old boy, he describes his family's journey with uncanny naiveté. Before leaving their home, he imagines his father's home country as something beautiful out of a fairytale, but as they make their way toward exile, he and his family realize that any attempt to make a home in Slovenia will be in vain. Confronted by misery, hunger, and hostility, the young boy refuses to learn Slovenian and falls silent, his surroundings becoming a social, cultural and mental abyss.
Kovačič meticulously, boldly, and sincerely portrays the objective, everyday world; the style is clear and direct. Told from the point of view of a child, one memory is interrupted by fragments and visions of another. Some are innocent and tender, while others are miserable and ruthless, resulting in a profound and heart-wrenching description of a period torn apart by conflict, reflected in the author's powerful and innovative command of language.Kovačič voted the outstanding Slovene novelist of the past twenty-five years
"Newcomers crystallizes 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
"Kovačič has often been compared to Proust for his ability to recapture the past, though there is something of Tolstoy in him as well—the dense feeling of reality his work evokes—and of the writer Danilo Kiš, whose “family cycle” so richly recalls the wartime Hungary of his childhood. These are admittedly august names, but Kovačič 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 Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, Newcomers is a European saga ... that begins with the author’s 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. Newcomers is an emblem of what memory — personal memory, political memory, a place’s memory — can create from erasure... [C]uriously hypnotic." --Los Angeles Review of Books
"A powerful 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 writer’s 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 can’t quite master, Bubi confronts the challenges and humiliations of growing up in a strange environment. Narrated with uncanny naïveté, 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 LitLojze Kovačič is one of the most important writers of our time, one who confirms our world in both text and deed."
— Miljenko JergovićIn 2016, Lojze Kovačič 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 Kovačič was born in Basel in 1928 to a German mother and Slovenian father. In 1938 the family was exiled to Slovenia, where Kovačič lived until his death in 2004. He is considered to be one of Slovenia's most significant authors, and Newcomers is widely regarded the most important Slovenian novel of the twentieth century. He received the Prešeren 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, Kovačič 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.THE ITALIAN SOLDIERS would cook spaghetti and vegetable soup on mess vehicles that were parked in the courtyard of the casino. They doled some of it out to kids… Karel, Ivan, Andrej and I would run there with canisters… We would wait in the entryway next to the Rio Café until the soldiers in the courtyard had eaten their fill. Then the cook would call out that we could approach one of the kettles on the high flatbeds. The ladles they used were as big as helmets: our gallon containers had never held so much spaghetti and tomato sauce, or rice with big chunks of meat… Now, in addition to breakfast, at which we crumbled into our coffee white melba toast from the crates we’d brought home, we could also look forward to hearty and truly filling main meals at our table… Then the Ninth Army Corps of the Ljubljana Region issued a decree that by a certain date all inhabitants had to return any weapons, clothing or foodstuffs that they’d looted from the barracks of the former Yugoslav Army. Anyone failing to do so who was found to have such items in their possession after the two-week grace period had passed would be punished: 1; 2; 3… Vati and I hid the crates as best we could, under some rags and old clothes… No, we weren’t going to give up that glorious toast at any cost, not even under threat of the death penalty… Sadly I was no longer able to take it with me onto the street because there were spies everywhere, and we couldn’t let anyone, not even the most innocent person, know that we had government-issued supplies at home.
At that time, they began using machines to cut down the gigantic bronze statue of King Aleksandar that was surrounded by a railing in the Star Park… It had been barely a few months since the formal unveiling, which the young King Petar II had attended wearing the uniform of an air force lieutenant… Before that, our whole school had gone to watch them use pulleys to hoist parts of the monument onto its high marble cube of a pedestal… an enormous boot in a stirrup… the muscular hindquarters of the horse… the king’s gloved hand holding the reins… half of his head with a pince-nez and that narrow hat. Now all of that bronze lay around in scales of varying sizes or dropped onto the sand…
I would go with Karel and Ivan to collect thorny-husked wild chestnuts off the roofs of the butchers’ sheds, which were also about to be demolished. Beyond the barracks, the tall columns and the denticulated roof of the new market were already going up, reaching from the Dragon Bridge to the Triple Bridge… From the river, its facade looked like a synagogue… The plans for it were by the same white-bearded, little man who had designed the chapels and a temple in the grove of the dead at ale Cemetery… From the barracks to the fence posts of the new market, we could see Italian soldiers in the company of young women. There were market vendors, housemaids, salesgirls, all sorts of them… We crept to the edge of the flat roof in order to see… They would be hugging and kissing. Some of the girls would be pressing those dark, wavy haircuts to their breasts, while others would be trying to fend them off, so that the soldiers had to pick up the girls’ arms and put them around their necks… I felt sorry for the
poor girls, but not all of them were equally deserving of pity… Once we caught one sitting on the seat of a bicycle that was leaning against a fence, with an Italian soldier standing on a block of wood in front of her… Ivan practically burst out laughing. Karel and I had to stifle him with our hands… The girl on the bicycle was still pretty young, blonde, wearing a blue apron – she was probably from one of the fruit vending stands in the market… She had her legs lifted up. She had thighs like some statue, like columns, hair on her ass and fur up front all the way to her navel… The fur opened up… like a mailman’s pouch… Ivan couldn’t stifle his laughter. Idiot! The Italian glanced up… He had his trousers bunched at his feet like a basket… “Avanti!” he roared… and he grabbed onto his red grenade… We jumped to our feet and ran over the rooftops until we reached the Dragon Bridge… Somebody whistled to us. It was some other soldier who was walking between the sheds and signaling something to us… “Hey!” he shouted. He pointed to a barrack and made that gesture… Poking the index finger of his right hand into the gap formed by the thumb and index finger of his left… That meant fucking. Gestures like that didn’t suit grown-ups at all. He pointed toward the barrack again, and we nodded. He turned around, took one step, and then, as if suddenly realizing something, turned back around. “Arrividerci!” we waved at him… Although these weren’t real soldiers in any sense of the word… more like pranksters in their baggy, comedic uniforms… you still had to take them seriously, if only on account of the grenades they carried and their hot temper, much less so because of the carbines, which were more suited to cavalry than foot soldiers.
Kovačič meticulously, boldly, and sincerely portrays the objective, everyday world; the style is clear and direct. Told from the point of view of a child, one memory is interrupted by fragments and visions of another. Some are innocent and tender, while others are miserable and ruthless, resulting in a profound and heart-wrenching description of a period torn apart by conflict, reflected in the author's powerful and innovative command of language.Kovačič voted the outstanding Slovene novelist of the past twenty-five years
"Newcomers crystallizes 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
"Kovačič has often been compared to Proust for his ability to recapture the past, though there is something of Tolstoy in him as well—the dense feeling of reality his work evokes—and of the writer Danilo Kiš, whose “family cycle” so richly recalls the wartime Hungary of his childhood. These are admittedly august names, but Kovačič 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 Knausgaard’s My Struggle and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, Newcomers is a European saga ... that begins with the author’s 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. Newcomers is an emblem of what memory — personal memory, political memory, a place’s memory — can create from erasure... [C]uriously hypnotic." --Los Angeles Review of Books
"A powerful 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 writer’s 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 can’t quite master, Bubi confronts the challenges and humiliations of growing up in a strange environment. Narrated with uncanny naïveté, 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 LitLojze Kovačič is one of the most important writers of our time, one who confirms our world in both text and deed."
— Miljenko JergovićIn 2016, Lojze Kovačič 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 Kovačič was born in Basel in 1928 to a German mother and Slovenian father. In 1938 the family was exiled to Slovenia, where Kovačič lived until his death in 2004. He is considered to be one of Slovenia's most significant authors, and Newcomers is widely regarded the most important Slovenian novel of the twentieth century. He received the Prešeren 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, Kovačič 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.THE ITALIAN SOLDIERS would cook spaghetti and vegetable soup on mess vehicles that were parked in the courtyard of the casino. They doled some of it out to kids… Karel, Ivan, Andrej and I would run there with canisters… We would wait in the entryway next to the Rio Café until the soldiers in the courtyard had eaten their fill. Then the cook would call out that we could approach one of the kettles on the high flatbeds. The ladles they used were as big as helmets: our gallon containers had never held so much spaghetti and tomato sauce, or rice with big chunks of meat… Now, in addition to breakfast, at which we crumbled into our coffee white melba toast from the crates we’d brought home, we could also look forward to hearty and truly filling main meals at our table… Then the Ninth Army Corps of the Ljubljana Region issued a decree that by a certain date all inhabitants had to return any weapons, clothing or foodstuffs that they’d looted from the barracks of the former Yugoslav Army. Anyone failing to do so who was found to have such items in their possession after the two-week grace period had passed would be punished: 1; 2; 3… Vati and I hid the crates as best we could, under some rags and old clothes… No, we weren’t going to give up that glorious toast at any cost, not even under threat of the death penalty… Sadly I was no longer able to take it with me onto the street because there were spies everywhere, and we couldn’t let anyone, not even the most innocent person, know that we had government-issued supplies at home.
At that time, they began using machines to cut down the gigantic bronze statue of King Aleksandar that was surrounded by a railing in the Star Park… It had been barely a few months since the formal unveiling, which the young King Petar II had attended wearing the uniform of an air force lieutenant… Before that, our whole school had gone to watch them use pulleys to hoist parts of the monument onto its high marble cube of a pedestal… an enormous boot in a stirrup… the muscular hindquarters of the horse… the king’s gloved hand holding the reins… half of his head with a pince-nez and that narrow hat. Now all of that bronze lay around in scales of varying sizes or dropped onto the sand…
I would go with Karel and Ivan to collect thorny-husked wild chestnuts off the roofs of the butchers’ sheds, which were also about to be demolished. Beyond the barracks, the tall columns and the denticulated roof of the new market were already going up, reaching from the Dragon Bridge to the Triple Bridge… From the river, its facade looked like a synagogue… The plans for it were by the same white-bearded, little man who had designed the chapels and a temple in the grove of the dead at ale Cemetery… From the barracks to the fence posts of the new market, we could see Italian soldiers in the company of young women. There were market vendors, housemaids, salesgirls, all sorts of them… We crept to the edge of the flat roof in order to see… They would be hugging and kissing. Some of the girls would be pressing those dark, wavy haircuts to their breasts, while others would be trying to fend them off, so that the soldiers had to pick up the girls’ arms and put them around their necks… I felt sorry for the
poor girls, but not all of them were equally deserving of pity… Once we caught one sitting on the seat of a bicycle that was leaning against a fence, with an Italian soldier standing on a block of wood in front of her… Ivan practically burst out laughing. Karel and I had to stifle him with our hands… The girl on the bicycle was still pretty young, blonde, wearing a blue apron – she was probably from one of the fruit vending stands in the market… She had her legs lifted up. She had thighs like some statue, like columns, hair on her ass and fur up front all the way to her navel… The fur opened up… like a mailman’s pouch… Ivan couldn’t stifle his laughter. Idiot! The Italian glanced up… He had his trousers bunched at his feet like a basket… “Avanti!” he roared… and he grabbed onto his red grenade… We jumped to our feet and ran over the rooftops until we reached the Dragon Bridge… Somebody whistled to us. It was some other soldier who was walking between the sheds and signaling something to us… “Hey!” he shouted. He pointed to a barrack and made that gesture… Poking the index finger of his right hand into the gap formed by the thumb and index finger of his left… That meant fucking. Gestures like that didn’t suit grown-ups at all. He pointed toward the barrack again, and we nodded. He turned around, took one step, and then, as if suddenly realizing something, turned back around. “Arrividerci!” we waved at him… Although these weren’t real soldiers in any sense of the word… more like pranksters in their baggy, comedic uniforms… you still had to take them seriously, if only on account of the grenades they carried and their hot temper, much less so because of the carbines, which were more suited to cavalry than foot soldiers.
PUBLISHER:
Steerforth Press
ISBN-10:
193981040X
ISBN-13:
9781939810403
BINDING:
Paperback
BOOK DIMENSIONS:
Dimensions: 5.9400(W) x Dimensions: 7.2300(H) x Dimensions: 1.2000(D)