Panorama

by Dušan Šarotar, Rawley Grau (Translator)

In Panorama Dušan Šarotar takes the reader on a deeply reflective yet kaleidoscopic journey from northern to southern Europe. In a manner reminiscent of W.G. Sebald, Šarotar supplements the narrative with photographs, which help to blur the lines between fiction and journalism. The writers experience of landscape is bound up in a personal yet elusive search for self-discovery, as he and a diverse group of international fellow travellers relate in their individual and distinctive voices their unique stories and their common quest for somewhere they might call home.

Along with Three Loves, One Death by Evald Flisar and None Like Her by Jela Krecic, Panorama is part of the three-book Slovenia World Series from Peter Owen Publishers and Istros Books. Each series brings to light the vibrant and innovative fiction produced in a featured country, offering readers the very best literature in translation.

Genres: Fiction, Travel, Literary Fiction

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

(Slovenija), rojen 1968. Je pisatelj, pesnik, scenarist,
urednik na Študentski založbi in urednik
literarne revije AirBeletrina (www.airbeletrina.
si). Na domačiji Miška Kranjca v Veliki
Polani organizira literarne večere. Je avtor šestih
dokumentarnih filmov pri RTV Slovenija.
Napisal je romana Potapljanje na dah (1999)
in Nočitev z zajtrkom (2003, tudi scenarij za
film), zbirko kratkih zgodb Mrtvi kot (2002)
ter pesniško zbirko Občutek za veter (2004).
Njegove zgodbe in pesmi so prevedene v več
jezikov.

Reviews

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author and scholar both make it clear that the writing is heavily influenced by Ivo Andrić and W.G. Sebald, but I have not read either of these authors so I can't really weigh in on that. The novel is fragmented, moving from place to place, starting in Northern Ireland to Belgium and finally to Slovenia. The author seems drawn to lonely places that are empty of the activity they used to have, whether from being out of season or out of favor; but he also comes from an empty place where people don't want to live if they are from there, due to war, displacement, and massive changes in language and culture.

A few quotations speak to the overall feeling of the changes and feeling of homelessness....

“People here are made out of things like goodbyes - final, permanent, painful goodbyes. Famine, Death, homesickness, it’s left its mark on us, this goddamn emigration - there are more of us living somewhere else than here at home.”

“It seems like the only reason we learn English is so that, in an emergency, we can people our loneliness with it, patch over the gaps and distances between us… I’m so grateful for those times when I’m by myself and can lie back and read Slovene in silence… I feel like that’s when I hear myself again… not everything can be captured from one language into another.”

“I left Sarajevo when I ran out of words, he had said: now I’m learning my mother tongue all over again; I want people here to understand each other again, one day I’d like to write a poem about it…”

I read this as part of my Europe 2021 reading project, but it was a definite challenge that I had to push myself to read. This is the second book by this small press that I've read this year and I'm glad they're doing the work they are doing! I can tell this is in conversation with some of his contemporaries or maybe one generation removed but I feel a bit uneducated in this conversation, and would like to read more from this region.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Words were rolling like multi-coloured marbles, the glass eyes scurrying away, hiding beneath the table, ducking out of sight for a moment as if waiting for inspiration, then taking off again; I felt that if I could freeze them, at least for a second, could read their placement in the room, I’d be able to capture the thought, the long sentence that was both hiding and revealing itself to me in seemingly random images.
[...]
I was full of sensations, baffling impressions that pushed their way into my consciousness like pictures in a disorganised photo album

Dušan Šarotar's Panorama forms part of Istros Books (now part of Peter Owens) series of Slovenian fiction, and has been translated into English under the same title by Rawley Grau. The Istros Books World Series focus on a country at a time, using the (apocryphal?) St Augustine quote that "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page." as a welcome call to arms for readers to explore translated fiction.

The title of Panorama is an explicit reference to the art of Gerhard Richter, and the text is interspersed with black-and-white photographs, typically panoramic seascape or skies but also of key buildings, memorials even the characters.

And the use of text interspersed with photography of course immediately brings to mind the work of the great W.G. Sebald. The resemblance is intentional, and acknowledged with an explicit reference to Sebald's wonderful"novels" and goes far beyond just the use of photography to the very style of the novel: fiction but written as a form of biographical travelogue written by a first person narrator who is the author's alter ego, a brooding presence in the background (typically the holocaust in Sebald's work, but complemented here with the Yugoslavian war), the themes of exile and loss, and the heavy textual use of reported conversations Jane said, Djini said to me) and recollections of thoughts and sensations e.g:.

now, when I give it some thought, neither at the time nor now can I see anything but the sea.
...
that is how I still see them today in my mind, as I did then
...
I believe I will still hear it even when I sit in silence after completing my work, maybe the most of all, as if it had gained strength in my memory

The homage even extends to the last line of the novel: I rode on to Antwerp station., an obvious nod to Austerlitz.

Šarotar's narrator begins the book in the west coast of Ireland, near Galway. His reason for being there is unclear - possibly a book-reading but perhaps also to find some form of exile or enlightenment (as is true of the Albanian driver/academic, Djini, he befriends and the tale Djini tells him of Jane, a Canadian but searching for her Irish roots):

The last maddened dogs and drenched, lost joggers were still running, despite the sky having warned them hours before, for the love of god, not to risk their bodies tonight at the mercy of the sky and the durability of their hearts. An exodus, I thought, but I myself will stay here cradling my unfinished manuscript and my longing for home in my lap, cast on the turbulent sea.

The area was both the last port of call for those leaving Ireland, particularly the diaspora due to the potato famine, but also an area in which others have sought exile. The story centres both on the wonderful story of Kylemore Abbey where some Benedictine nuns re-established a convent after their original home in Ypres was destroyed during World War I and the monks who sought refuge in the area, keeping the flame of Christianity and culture alight during the dark ages. On the latter point, Sir Kenneth Clark's Civilisation argues: "Looking back from the great civilizations of twelfth-century France or seventeenth-century Rome, it is hard to believe that for quite a long time-almost a hundred years-western Christianity survived by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock eighteen miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea"

The story also crosses Europe, through Belgium (Brussels, Ypres, Gent, Antwerp) back to his homeland countries that once formed Yugoslavia. The narrator, a Slovenian author, has an unresolved but thought-provoking dialogue with a friend of a friend, a Serbian literary professor, now teaching in Brussels, happily admits she has never studed Slovenian literature:

All those small language literatures - it's never interested me. Somewhere there was once a land with great literature, where charismatic writers lived, but now those cities are no more and only ashes and unjust borders remain to tell of them, and their great writers have all died, have scattered in foreign languages or drowned in minor language translations.

She references Danilo Kiš, Miloš Crnjanski and Ivo Andrić as those great writers, all of whom, of course, wrote in Serbo-Croatian, but Šarotar (or his narrator) while he draws heavily for his inspiration on Danilo Kiš, also references the Slovene language poet Gregor Strniša.

Sarotar is particularly strong on descriptions of scenery - panoramas - although at time he piles the similes and metaphors on one another perhaps a little too thickly. I found this a book best read in small doses than one on which to gorge:

Like a mirage at the end of the road, without reflection or gleam, dark and grey, a geometric plane shadowed in pencil on a yellowed sheet of drawing paper - that's what the sea looked like - shallow, motionless, monastery beer spilled into eternity on to a black stone floor, but mainly trapped in a wide, ever wider, nearly limitless landscape; the nearer I was to the shore, the greater, the more impressive was the bay, in the middle of which stood a black lighthouse on sharp rocks, no bigger than a wizard's ring, hovering on the motionless surface, while the master's pale hand, still wearing it proudly, had long ago sunk beneath the sea.

And - one obvious contrast to Sebald - Šarotar's narrator makes more use of modern technology such as GPS, with a particular emphasis on contrasting that to the ancient history of the places he uses it to find:

By the old roadside cross where the two lanes split, as if facing temptation, I had stopped and got off the bicycle, and with the tablet on my knees, was waiting for the satellites to find me, for only this would I exist again, have my inner landscape returned to me, be re-inscribed on the refreshed map of manes, although invisible, although merely virtual, like a memory from which a future text was only now emerging , with the shape and atmosphere of something last but never lost, as if illuminated by sunbeams breaking through floating clouds - so then, I was pondering and weighing the situation, although everything had been decided long before I got here, maybe even before I was born.

Definitely thought provoking. One obvious criticism would be that Sebald has done much of it before and better, but then few writers in any genre stand comparison to Sebald.

[Ken · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ever been driving your car while you daydream or worry about an appointment up ahead? Then, suddenly, something on the road (a tailgater, a car pulling out in front of you) snaps you back to the here and now, scaring all hell out of you because you wonder how it is you were driving a car on "automatic pilot" for the past five minutes? You try to reassure yourself by recalling something from the past few minutes, but no. Nothing. In fact, you WERE driving this dangerous piece of hurtling metal depending on some inner phantom driver.

Reading Panorama was, for me, a lot like that. Sarotar offers few if any paragraphs. Just on-and-on paragraphs like an endless highway through Nebraska. No quotation marks for talking, either. Just runny paint blurring narrative from dialogue. Constantly, like the driver, this reader stopped himself and said, "Hey, wait a minute. I just read three pages and recall none of it!" So back I went, dutifully.

In essence, this is not a plot book. But most "non-plot" books are character books. This is not a character book, either. I think the author's hope is that readers would find it Sebald-like in its genre elusion. I did not find it so, much as I searched. To me, it was a mixture of travel book (Serbians in Ireland, in Belgium, etc.) and description book. Don't get me wrong, there are a few moments where Sarotar's descriptions are indeed, poetic. It's just that I drove through most of them.

[Gianni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Conosco troppo poco Sebald, Nietzsche, Kis, Joyce e Vangelo per cogliere delle assonanze, e per questo ed altro c’è l’interessante e approfondita postfazione di Patrizia Raveggi (leggendo la postfazione ho avuto la netta sensazione di aver colto, ahimè, al massimo la metà del libro……), ma sicuramente lo stile di Panorama ricorda molto Thomas Bernard, la sua ”letteratura peripatetica”, la voce interiore che si interseca con quelle esterne, il narratore che riferisce ciò che qualcuno ha riferito di un altro che ha riferito……., ”Jane veniva sempre qui, prima di tutto, ha detto lui, qui ha senso iniziare il racconto, aveva detto Jane, ha detto Gjini, e così sia, andiamo, ha detto, dobbiamo affrettarci.”
Letteratura itinerante perché tempi, luoghi ed eventi si susseguono e si sovrappongono incessantemente, senza soluzione di continuità, sorretti da uno stile fatto di periodi molto lunghi, con incisi, flashback, anticipazioni, cambi di scena narrativa, tanto che spesso ci si inceppa e occorre tornare indietro perché non si sa più chi dice cosa, e perché la scena si divide tra Irlanda, Belgio e Bosnia, perché coloro di cui si parla sono spatriati, fuggiti o costretti a migrare, a rinunciare anche alla lingua, a non riconoscere più ciò che il tempo e gli eventi hanno irrimediabilmente cambiato.
Panorama ha una prosa ricca di immagini, di Storia che si veste di storie personali, di paesaggi esterni e interiori, di quadri, architetture urbane ed è arricchito da moltissime fotografie in bianco e nero scattate da Sarotar e funzionali al racconto che di per sé è autobiografia, narrazione, saggio, e nonostante la non facile lettura è un libro che cattura e ammalia.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an atmospheric, densely written landscape of words. Rather than chapters or even sections, I would say this book is divided into portions, some large, some small, most narrating conversations of the author’s friends and acquaintances, together with some introspective remembrances by the author himself. The result is, indeed, a panorama on our (mankind’s) relationships - to our physical environment, country and culture, family and friends, out past and our present. Despite the first person narration and the narrator’s physical presence and participation in each scene, the author’s voice is surprisingly absent allowing us, as the reader, to take in the landscape, giving us the space to make our own connections and reflections.

Somewhat ironically I read this book over the course of a week of rainstorms in northern California which often perfectly matched the grey, blustery, dripping, yet luminous, country of Ireland where the first part of the story takes place thus giving me a wry appreciation of traveling in such wet environs. I had never considered that as an American, especially as an American of European descent, I always considered Ireland as a place to be from. It is the old country, one of the oldest countries, the place people lived before there was a North America. Yet the author and his acquaintances, being natives of the Balkan tribes, saw Ireland as a place their forbearers went to. It was the destination, the place where they settled, long before there was a north America or even a United States, long before famine would force them off Ireland’s shores for the new world. They were from the old country, Ireland was a new country and the United States and Canada were newer still. Were I to stand alongside the author as a tourist to Ireland’s many picturesque destinations, the landscape would invoke a subtly different reaction, my observations and relationship to the experience would be different than his even if our physical experiences of the tourist visit were identical.

The writings also returned frequently to the observation that the wars in the Balkans have fundamentally altered, perhaps even severed, the relationship natives of the region have to their countries, cultures and history as a place. As one professor of Slovenia literature put it, she can teach Slovenia works to students of many backgrounds and countries, but they will never fully understand it or comprehend it in a way that those from the Balkan regions will, and even her daughter who is now a young adult, cannot understand the country as it was before the war. The experiences are so centrally different that a full translation of the literature is not possible.

Šarotar’s prose is poetic, a treat to read. The style of this book is strongly reminiscent of W. G. Sebald, complete with supplementary photos, but Šarotar puts his own stamp on the approach to make it his own and not just an imitation. There were sections of the book where I wondered if the translation was up to the original, whether it was doing the original justice. These were sections where the writing sounded a bit broken or unnaturally dense. However, those places were few and once one understands the rhythm of Šarotar’s writing, the reading goes smoothly. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley and am so grateful for the gift. I’ve discovered a new author for myself and can only hope that many more works of his are translated into English.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received an ARC from the publisher.

Fiction, poetry, travelogue, history, short story, memoir, photo essay. Šarotar’s latest work, translated into English from Slovenian for Istros Books as part of their World Series venture with Peter Owens Publishers, defines categorization into a single, specific genre. The unnamed narrator, whose own biography resembles that of Šarotar himself, opens this piece with a poetic description of his journey through the landscapes he encounters while in Ireland. The moods and textures of the Irish landscape, with a focus on the sea, dominate his literary illustrations. The narrator also describes a trip to Belgium where he encounters some follow writers and translators who are expats from his part of the world. Everywhere he travels, this unnamed narrator captures the plight of the immigrant in his writing as he encounters men and women who are displaced from their homes either by force or by choice.

The narrator is a writer who has journeyed from his home in Slovenia to Galway in order to find time and inspiration to finish writing a manuscript. He gives us snapshots of his surroundings through his disjointed stories and through his camera lens. In the first scene our writer is sitting in his damp and cold third floor room in Galway listening to a storm raging outside and in the next scene he is walking along the Galway Bay and looking at a plaque with the names of all the families who had escaped the famine via the ocean between 1847 and 1853. In another moment he is passing by the Aquarium, a glass semicircular building, when he encounters a an old pier with diving platforms. The sea is the dominant force in this landscape and he captures its focal point in a variety of unique vignettes. For visual interest the narrator also includes photos that serve to enhance the written descriptions throughout the text:

People are really swimming, I thought and was delighted by the chance of seeing somebody dive into the cold, rolling Atlantic Ocean, although at the thought of swimming I felt a chill, in spite of the sun, which was glowing like a white spot on a blue eye. I sat down on the wet, black rocks beneath the pier and watched a sparse procession of bathers, both male and female, all older townspeople who had probably been bathing here since childhood; they walked in silence, backs straight, with the practiced poise of swimmers, the men in simple blue linen knee-length trunks, the women in black one-piece swimsuits, everyone with close fitting rubber caps on their heads;

panorama-diving-tower

Embedded with the narrator’s story of his journey, is the story of his tour guide and driver through the Connemara region, an Albanian immigrant named Gjini. Throughout the course of Panorama, the narrator picks up the thread of different pieces of Gjini’s story who leaves his wife and children behind in Albania in an attempt to make a better living in Ireland. When he arrives on the island, he doesn’t know a word of English so he begins by working at the bus station selling sandwiches during the day and cleaning offices at night. He gradually learns enough English to pass the language test and enroll as a student in Irish cultural heritage studies. Gjini’s reflections on being a foreigner, as he is viewing the empty landscape of the peat bogs with the narrator, are profound, enlightening and timely:

Although I was a foreigner, an immigrant, and still learning the jargon of high academia, and was moreover the oldest student in the group, a person who with some effort and for his own survival was merely skillfully concealing his homesickness, swallowing his anger, the disappointment and despair of the refugee, which were still mixed with will, with determination for a new beginning, and with inconsolable nostalgia, which, in fact, appeared and found its true name only later, when I had somehow got on my feet, as soon as I sensed that we would somehow make it, would be able to transplant ourselves, put down at least shallow roots in new soil, and even later, when I would come back again and stop here, mostly on my own but occasionally with my family, and take long walks, when my second education, if you will, was successfully behind me….—that’s when I realized we were in some ways alike, we can’t hide or suppress our background, no matter where we are from or where we are born, we’re made out of a substance, like soil or an island, and on top of it, nostalgia, Gjini said, and the Irish understand this.

panorama-irish-shore
The history of Kylemore Abbey is also woven into the narrator’s text and serves as a bridge between his journeys to Ireland and Belgium. The Benedictine Order arrived at the Abbey in 1920 after their own abbey in Ypres, Belgium was burned to the ground during World War I. The nuns flight on foot to Paris is mentioned in the narrative and Gjini tells the story of how they settled at Kylemore and restored the castle and the garden. The narrator himself makes this trek in reverse as he travels to Belgium after his trip to Ireland. He is giving a talk in Ghent and while on his trip he meets up with a woman named Spomenka who tells him the story of her escape from the dangerous wars in Sarajevo. There is a deep, underlying sadness in her story because she feels as if she is forced to leave her home with her young daughter in order to escape the violence and bloodshed that broke out all around her. A kind neighbor helps Spomenka to escape and she never goes back.

Finally, a comment must be made about the style of writing that Šarotar employs for his narrative. The meandering nature of his story reflects his own restlessness as he journeys throughout Europe and encounters others who have been displaced from their native homes. Different threads and characters are brought up and dropped; some of the threads are brought up again and others are left without a conclusion. Šarotar is a master at using vignettes to capture the struggle of immigrants and refugees who are attempting to find a place in the world that feels safe and like home.

[Marian · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars leaning towards 4. This book is more nonfiction than fiction, and a little difficult to rate.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

With a nod to the work of WG Sebald, Sarotar orchestrates a powerful meditation on language, landscape, loss, identity ad the migrant experience. My full, detailed critical review and a link to an excerpt, is published at Numéro Cinq: http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2016/11...

[John Madera · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the English translation of this, and it's excellent, reminiscent, at times, of the writing of Sebald (whose work is referenced in the book) and László Krasznahorkai.

[Terry Pitts · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s tempting — and partly right — to think of the Slovenian writer Dušan Šarotar as a modernized W.G. Sebald, as a restless, observant wanderer equipped with a streak of melancholy and a notebook, but also with a tablet and a smart phone. Šarotar’s "Panorama: A Narrative About the Course of Events" is written in extended sentences that can meander for pages, weaving around the many black-and-white photographs he embeds in his text. The book’s narrator, who is surely based on Šarotar himself, travels in Ireland, the Aran Islands, Belgium, Slovenia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is at his best as an intent, if not intense, observer, grappling with nature’s whims and attempting to describe the multitude of emotions that he feels in response.

If "Panorama" has a central theme it is language or, more precisely, language and place. The narrator and nearly everyone he encounters is either traveling outside his or her own country or has left it to live elsewhere. They are both tourists and emigres. "Panorama" is a blend of fiction, memoir, and reportage. It's beautifully written and captivating to read.

For a more lengthy review, see my blog post https://sebald.wordpress.com/2017/04/24/the-wandering-souls-of-panorama/.

[Davide Trava · Rating 4 out of 5]

«L’unica cosa che mi fa davvero male è che non posso più parlare nella mia lingua con nessuno», così Spomenka racconta il suo viaggio per lasciare Sarajevo durante la guerra mentre dentro di sé, tenendo per mano la figlia, si chiedeva «hai paura che papà spari dalla collina?».

Questo è uno dei passaggi secondo me più significativi di “Panorama. Narrazione sullo svolgersi degli eventi”, ovvero un viaggio tra vari confini europei che si interroga sull’idea di appartenenza.

Un po’ come W.G. Sebald, Joyce e a suo modo Ivo Andrić in questo libro lo sloveno Dušan Šarotar cerca di raccontare un’odissea contemporanea fatta di donne e uomini comuni.

A partire dalla pioggia e dalle nebbie irlandesi questi libro segue uno scrittore errante che conduce il lettore a Galway, in Belgio, a Lubiana, Mostar, Travnik e infine Sarajevo, sulle tracce di persone «costruite di sostanze simili agli addii». Gli Ulisse di questa narrazione dai tratti omerici sono infatti uomini e donne che hanno dovuto abbandonare il proprio Paese e il ricordo che di questo in loro rimane. Ci sono Gjini, autista albanese appassionato dell’Abbazia di Kylemore; Jane, donna per metà irlandese e per metà americana; Spomenka, professoressa di letteratura emigrata dall’ex Jugoslavia appassionata di letteratura universale, di Danilo Kiš e Miloš Crnjanski; Senadin, poeta di Sarajevo e molti altri.

In queste pagine epoche, luoghi e avvenimenti confluiscono senza tregua in un labirintico torrente senza soluzione di continuità arricchito da numerosi riferimenti alla letteratura mitteleuropea del XIX e XX secolo.

“Panorama” è libro ma può anche essere un manuale di viaggio da compiere, visto che di Sarajevo condivido con l’autore la conoscenza di alcuni bar e librerie tra la Radićeva e il ponte Festina lente.
Un viaggio che si affronta d’un fiato, immergendosi in una narrazione estremamente visiva, che racconta di persone disperse in lingue straniere, inabissate nell’alluvione in fuga da città fatte a pezzi.

Recensione completa su Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/CmburDaNY...

[Angie Reisetter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This story wandered in and out of focus for me. There were moments in which I was not sure what was going on, out of time and place, unsure who was narrating -- was it the main character, or one of the many people they talked to in their travels? I say they because I'm not really sure of anything regarding the main character -- perhaps I should assume he, but that doesn't feel sure. There were other moments in which something snapped into place and hit me hard: loss, identity, injustice, guilt. Those moments took my breath away. Emerging from the haze as they did only amplified their effects.

It's a bit of a travel log, but light on personal rumination. It's focused on the intriguing people the narrator runs across. He is from Yugoslavia and tends to run into people from there or nearish (a main character is an Albanian living in Ireland) that have been displaced. They've gone to Ireland or to Belgium and struggled with how much of themselves to leave behind. The basic questions they struggle with are universal, but have a particular tint of the refugee, the immigrant, those layering identities on top of one another.

There's no real plot to hold all of this together, other than "I went to these places and met these people, but that works here. A snapshot of struggle.

I got a free copy to review from Net Galley.

[Jai Lau · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seemingly intended as a concentration test. Šarotar does almost everything he can to make this book a miserable experience for the reader. With a broken enter key, paragraphs are almost entirely absent and the majority of the book is written in reported speech with the various speakers moving from exhaustive reminiscing to making inane comments in the present. Throw in extensive description of locations, sleep-inducing subject matter and no discernible differences between the characters or their voices, it is easy to go 5-10 pages without remembering anything that you have read. A pretty unenjoyable experience but it does have some pretty pictures in it.

[Enzo · Rating 4 out of 5]

E' un romanzo particolare, difficile da catalogare o da paragonare. Ha uno stile complesso, specie nella prima parte, con un vero e proprio stream of consciousness che incuriosisce ma appesantisce anche la lettura.
È in sostanza un curioso tentativo dell'autore di affrontare varie tematiche legate alla sua memoria, alla Storia e al viaggio inteso come esperienza e non come svago. Il tutto attraverso le vicende di alcuni personaggi di diversa nazionalità che si trovano su suolo europeo ma non nel loro Paese.
È senz'altro consigliato anche se di lettura non facile per via dello stile adottato dall'autore

[Massimiliano · Rating 2 out of 5]

Per quanto sia bello esteticamente (la Keller...), per quanto lo sia anche concettualmente (vagabondaggi per l’Europa, il vecchio continente), questo libro mi ha solo sfiorato.
Avverto che avrebbe voluto dirmi molto di più, ma lo stile adottato dall’autore, un gigantesco flusso di coscienza, non mi ha catturato e mi ha anzi lasciato una sensazione di nebbia nella mente.
Peccato, le carte in regola per piacermi c’erano tutte.

[Andreja Kumer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super knjiga. Potem, ko sem končno razumela, v kakšnem stilu avtor piše, se mi je odprlo novo obzorje, povezava Joyca in Rushdija pokaže pot migrantom, ki iščejo svoj del na zemlji. NJigova zgodba se me je dotaknila.

[Steven Benson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sebald light but worth reading for the poetic sublimation of exile and loss into landscape

[Peter · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too contrived, overwrought.

[Vel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense, intricate, superb. (esp. if one has run out of Sebald to read)

[Cats 274 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ko sem zagledala neskončne stavke, sem podvomila v svojo idejo, da začnem z branjem. Ko sem pa našla pravi ritem, sem z navdušenjem nadaljevala do konca. Res, res dobra knjiga.

[Aubrary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too narrative. Despite the photos,I felt like it focused more on telling the stories rather than showing the stories (not sure if I'm conveying my feelings here).

[World Literature Today]

"Brilliantly evocative black-and-white photos by the author trace the text’s moods, showing—among other, perhaps happier scenes of people and buildings beautiful in themselves—also the pocked, eviscerating shoreline, the intransigence of water and floods, walls and crashes, and an ephemeral present, redolent with displacement and statelessness, waiting and mourning. Evocation of these states is this book’s main achievement." - Andrew Singer

This book was reviewed in the March/April 2017 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...

[Tfalcone · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you Net Galley for the free ARC.

This book is written in beautiful language. It is like the writer is meditating about the landscape he is in. He describes the setting around Galway, Ireland, the rugged coast, the graveyards and the memorial about men gone down with the sea.
I wish the photos were more than just black and white snapshots, they are supporting the story, but they are plain photos, nothing special or artistic.