Appalling and tragic, Ognjen Spahic's exceptional short novel animates the misery of Ceasescu's Romania and its inglorious fall with a metaphor fully up to the task: leprosy. Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen was a Norwegian scientist who isolated the Mycobacterium leprae in 1873 and his 'children' are the tragic sufferers of this ghastly disease. In Spahic's novel, it's 1989 and a dozen of them are confined to the last leper house in Europe, an under-equipped facility located in a miserable corner of South Eastern Romania overlooking a toxic fertilizer factory. Here our nameless narrator shares a room with fellow-sufferer Robert W. Duncan, an American intelligence officer whose career was ruined after he was captured by Communists in Berlin. But Duncan still has a few contacts in the shadowlands, notably 'Mr Smooth' who has it in his power to liberate the two men by supplying passports and helping them out of the country. Blending Romania's turbulent 1989 revolution with a lyrical fiction that both shocks and enthrals, Montenegrin author Ognjen Spahic offers an allegorical page to Southeastern Europe's intriguing scrapbook. In 'Hansen's Children', the downfall of Nicolae Ceausescu's repressive control is witnessed from behind the walls of Europe's sole leper-colony. Powerless against forces beyond the leprosarium, the rebellious political change seen across the country influences and erodes the camp's brittle harmony.
Recenzijas
"Appalling and tragic, Ognjen Spahic's exceptional short novel animates the misery of Ceasescu's Romania and its inglorious fall with a metaphor fully up to the task: leprosy." Elsbeth Lindner, BookOxygen "This is classic Balkan writing ,where everything is there in one book: wit , sadness, surrealism, friendship and horror" Stu Allen, Winstonsdad blog "Ognjen Spahic should be praised for using such an interesting factual motif to discuss weighty topics such as isolation, prejudice, and national identity. Modern East European literature is dominated by such themes, yet few have approached his with originality and inventiveness exhibited in Hansen's Children. Translated by Will Firth, the novel received the Ovid Festival Prize in 2011. Winning alongside Milan Kundera, Spahic is in good company." Richard W. Jackson, BookHugger 'This is a book about beings making animals of other's bodies, all the time, and how they keep themselves on the side of civilisation. Elegantly and mercilessly, it progresses towards its conclusion.' Rookery in the Bookery
Papildus informācija
Winner of Mesa Selimovic Award 2004.
Ognjen Spahic was born in 1977 in Podgorica, Montenegro. He is the best-known member of the young generation of Montenegrin writers to have emerged since the collapse of former Yugoslavia. Spahic has published two collections of short stories: Sve to (All That, 2001) and Zimska potraga (Winter Search, 2007). His novel Hansenova djeca (Hansen's Children, 2004) won him the 2005 Mesa Selimovic Prize for the best new novel from Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia-Herzegovina. It also won the 2011 Ovid Festival Prize, an award for literature translated into Romanian. To date, Hansenova djeca has been published in Slovenian, Romanian, Hungarian and Macedonian editions. Spahic's short stories have been translated into Czech, Greek, Turkish, Romanian, Bulgarian, English, Albanian and German. His short story "Raymond is No Longer with Us - Carver is Dead" was included in the anthology Best European Fiction 2011 published by Dalkey Archive Press in the USA. Spahic lives in Podgorica.
