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Archipelago Books

Newcomers: Book Three

Newcomers: Book Three

by Lojze Kovačič, translated from the Slovenian by Michael Biggins

$28.00
$28.00
Available as E-Book Fiction International Literature
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The third and final volume of Lojze Kovačič’s Newcomers finds Bubi in Ljubljana anxiously awaiting the end of the Second World War. Will the new regime identify his German speaking family as enemies of the state? Kovačič describes this chaotic new era in a flood of visionary language. From early voting systems (where a voter threw a rubber ball into one of two urns) to show trials, homelessness in freezing Ljubljana winter to the warm buzz of newspaper offices, youth brigades building the railroad to a state-run textile mill—life surges through a people lacerated by war. And all the time Bubi develops his ideas about art and the new communist society. He comes to feel that friendship means “mutual assistance, freedom . . . admitting your own weaknesses, shared resistance against fulfilling norms . . .” His story, in this final volume, is spurred on by an effort to live up to those ideals.

Again and again, the details in this novel inspire awe. With a few fresh words, Kovačič conjures a face, a hillside, a sickbed, or a jail cell. Michael Biggins has a rare ear for the intricacies of the English language. His translation shivers with all the passion, shame, and tenderness of the original.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781962770897
Pages: 520
Publication Date:

Praise

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.
—Dustin Illingworth, The Nation

Book Two deepens one’s appreciation for Kovačič’s major stylistic gambit...Ultimately, 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.
—Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

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

Lojze Kovačič is one of the most important writers of our time, one who confirms our world in both text and deed.
—Miljenko Jergović

Newcomers is an emblem of what memory — personal memory, political memory, a place’s memory — can create from erasure... Curiously hypnotic.
—Zack Hatfield, 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 . . . Kovačič skillfully depicts a tough, nomadic, hand-to-mouth existence in a city gripped by ethnic tension, rampant nationalism and the threat of war . . . Not only accessible, but deeply memorable.
—Malcom Forbes, Star Tribune

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