Event Highlights: European Voices: A Reading & Conversation with Maja Haderlap
On Thursday, October 13, the Pardee School of Global Studies at 121 Bay State Road opened its doors to Austrian-Slovenian author Maja Haderlap, accompanied by her translator, Tess Lewis, to talk about her most recent work, Angel of Oblivion. Born in Austria to a rural, Slovenian-speaking family, Haderlap and her family were in the minority; the majority of Southern Austria spoke German. Angel of Oblivion narrates that disparity, centering around a young protagonist who has to traverse the rigid boundaries between both the equally burdened Slovenian and German languages, and their contrasting communities.
A coming of age story, Angel of Oblivion is not entirely a memoir, but it also is not entirely a novel—critics of Haderlap’s have dismissed its multifaceted nature, but Haderlap sees the label “messy hybrid” in a positive light. It is no wonder that this work intermixes elements of both poetry and prose, memoir and fiction, and history and culture–this work exists in a particularly difficult moment of history, one wrought with contradictions, excellently encapsulated as Haderlap interweaves her own childhood experiences. “You work with shadows as well as the light,” she notes.
The book, written in German, aims to connect the same two communities Haderlap was torn between while growing up. “It is the grounds for connection between the Slovenian speaking minority and their German neighbors,” Tess Lewis translates from Haderlap’s German. “In Europe, you wall yourself up—more than in the US. If you’re this, you are this and you can’t be that. I try to break this pattern.”
Engaging with the complex themes of the vagaries of memory, the confusion of contradictory emotions, and the struggle of formulating an identity within a community, Angel of Oblivion’s heartbreaking narrative unearths values and issues just as poignant today as they were some fifty years ago.
-Toria Rainey ‘18
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