Kovačič voted the outstanding Slovene novelist of the past twenty-five years "
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." –
Wall Street Journal "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 Kis, 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."
– The Nation "Like
Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle and
Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels,
Newcomers is a European saga ... that begins with the author's youth and creeps outward, describing life with a rare acuity that not only captures both its dramas and banalities, but also considers them with equal significance.
Newcomers is an emblem of what memory – personal memory, political memory, a place's memory – can create from erasure... [C]uriously hypnotic."
–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 . . .This fine novel is not only accessible, but deeply memorable."
– Minneapolis Star Tribune "Kovacic impressively catches the mood of the early years of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The volumes are masterpieces. They are bitter, but grippingly intense in their description... Newcomers is a mnemonic sleight of hand of botanical exactitude, a weighty historical document whose significance will only grow."
–Sign and Sight
"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
"One of the major Slovenian prose writers of the last sixty years."
–Words Without Borders
"In this second part of the famous Slovenian writer's autobiographical novel, the narrator details the dangers and humiliations of his boyhood living in occupied Slovenia in the Second World War...Reeling from the loss of his home in Switzerland, and surrounded by a language he can't quite master, Bubi confronts the challenges and humiliations of growing up in a strange environment. Narrated with uncanny naïveté, the novel flits between memories of tenderness and shocking violence as Bubi navigates friendship, family, and his burgeoning sexuality in a land under hostile occupation."
– Translated Lit
