Slovenia
The 2010 Slovenian session will take place on Monday, May 10 at 7 to 8:30pm with special guest, translator Erica Johnson Debeljak moderating. This event will take place at the Residence of the Consul General of Slovenia, Upper West Side, Manhattan. If you would like to register for this event and ask for your complimentary copy of A Difficult Spring, send us an email at slovenia.nyc@europeanbookclub.org or by phone at (212)370-3006 When you register, please make sure to provide us with your full NYC mailing address. The English translation of A Difficult Spring has not yet been distributed in the United States, but a complimentary copy will be mailed to you once you have registered.The Book: A Difficult Spring, by Boris Pahor
A Difficult Spring explores the existential choice – between life and death, love and darkness – faced by Radko Suban, a young former concentration camp inmate, who spends several months in a French sanitarium. During his stay he falls in love with a pretty, trite, and flirtatious young nurse whose capriciousness strikes him as a betrayal of the camps and all who died there, and yet also as the very source of life.
About the Author:
Boris Pahor (1913, Trieste) is a member of the Slovenian minority in the Trieste region. Until the last decade of the 20th century, he was recognised as a great writer neither in Italy nor in Slovenia (Yugoslavia). Only in 1992 did the Republic of Slovenia award him with the “Prešeren award for life work”. The wider reception of Pahor’s work began after the novels Le pélerin parmi les ombres and Printemps difficile had been published in France. Later on, he received the “Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres” (by the Ministry of Culture of France). In 2001, the novel Necropolis received the prize of the book of the year (Bestenliste) in Germany. In 2007, Pahor recived the “Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur” from the president of the French Republic. Pahor has been also proposed to the Academy of Sweden for the Nobel Prize for literature. In 2008, he was awarded with the “Premio Internazionale Viareggio Versilia”, the “Premio Napoli” and the “Premio Latisana”. Necropolis became the “Book of the Year” at Fahreneit – Radio 3. It was only in 2008 that Pahor appered on the map of the great Trieste authors, such as Claudio Magris, Italo Svevo, Umberto Saba. In 2009, Pahor became ordinary member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. His descriptions of the Nazi concentration camp experience place him in the company of Solzhenitsyn, Primo Levi and Imre Kertest.
Pahor’s literary opus is closley connected to his personal experience of the most destructive moments of the first half of the 20th century history. The experience of Fascist Italy is described in his collection of novellas A Bonfire in the Quay and in the novel The Villa by the Lake. The macabre experience of his concentration camp years provided the material for the novel Necropolis (1967) and partly for the novel A Difficult Spring (1978).