Herta Müller's "Animal of the Heart" and "Tin Boys" by Svetlana Aleksijevic are two new translations of novels by Nobel laureates published by Laguna. Herta Müller's novel "Animal of the heart" talks about the fear that dictatorship instills in people and friendship as the only true escape, while "Tin Boys" by Svetlana Aleksievich is a testimony to the futility of war and the meaninglessness of victims.
"Animal of the Heart", Herta Müller's second novel published in 1994, talks about Romania in the eighties of the last century, about omnipresent fear, about the idea of escaping from Ceausescu's dictatorship, about friendship, trust and betrayal. Friendship creates the appearance of deliverance, but in a world hostile to life, without friendship deliverance becomes impossible. The Romanian neologism inimal combines the word inima (heart) and animal (animal), everyone carries the animal of the heart within themselves, it determines who we are, and thus our destiny. Lola's suicide, which may also be murder, connects four young people. An unbreakable friendship develops between them, although perhaps, in some other circumstances, they would have completely different friends. Constant death threats, murders and suicides, tip-offs, interrogations and surveillance produce an almost palpable fear. Fear was created with the intention of keeping people in submission, to break them or to make them flee, which is mostly the rush of death into the embrace. Although it turns out that the tentacles of fear and real threats reach very far. External escape is only an illusion, fear must be overcome in one's own animal heart. Herta Müller writes about a very specific historical moment, but she actually tells about a fear inherent in all times - a fear that eats away all trust between people, and between those who love each other. The novel "Animal of the Heart" is full of obvious autobiographical details. Both Herta Miller and the narrator who addresses us in the novel in the first person are Romanian Swabians. Herta Müller also worked as a translator of technical descriptions of machines since 1976. She too, because she refused to spy on and tip off Sekuritatea, was fired in 1979. She too experienced betrayal by close friends. And Herty Miller, just like her heroine, was granted permission to leave the country, after which she moved to Germany. She too received death threats long after the move. Herta Müller was born in 1953 in Nichidorf, Romania, and has been living in Berlin since 1987 as a writer. She has been awarded numerous German and international awards for her work. In 2009, Herta Müller received the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is the author of the books: "The King Bows and Kills", "Pale Gentlemen with Mugs of Mocha", "The Beast of the Heart", "The Fox Has Always Been a Hunter", "Man is the Greatest Pheasant in this World" and "Swinging Breath".
"Tin Boys" by Svetlana Aleksievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, is a dramatic book about the Soviet war in Afghanistan. In her polyphonic novel-confession, Svetlana Aleksievich, through the literary testimony of her interlocutors, ordinary, "little" people, presents the difficult and unfortunate fates of young Russian men who returned from the battlefield in Afghanistan in tin boxes. That "wrong war," as one voice in this disturbing book says, lasted for ten years (1979-1989), claimed the lives of 15 Soviet soldiers and over 150 mujahideen, and significantly influenced the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of Communist rule. parties. Without this world bestseller, it is impossible to imagine the history of this senseless war. Many inconsolable mothers, relatives, friends, and even surviving soldiers, horrified by the truth that came out in full light after the publication of the book, under pressure from the Soviet government, various "support groups", judicial authorities and the regime press, sued Svetlana Aleksievich for defamation. By changing theses, they refused to accept that the "tin boys" had fought in vain, and in court they also gave up their own testimony. The most significant parts of that court process are an integral part of this exceptional book, which changed the consciousness of Russian people. "Tin Boys" presents honest and exciting testimonies of officers and soldiers, nurses and prostitutes, mothers, sons and daughters who describe the Afghan war and its consequences. The outcome is a story shocking in its brutality and condemnation of war. With this book, Svetlana Aleksijevic gives a voice to those who have been speechless, exposing not only stories that we would not otherwise hear, but also individuals, participants in the horrors of war. In this way, she enabled them to speak for everyone by speaking for themselves.
Svetlana Aleksandrovna Aleksievich (1948, Stanislav, Ukraine), Soviet and Belarusian writer, journalist and scriptwriter of documentary films. It is written in Russian. Her father was Belarusian, her mother Ukrainian. She completed her journalism studies at the Belarusian State University in 1972 and worked as an educator, history and German language teacher in several schools in the south of Belarus and as a journalist in a local Belarusian newspaper. Admitted to the Union of Writers of the USSR in 1983. Since 2000, lived in Italy, France and Germany, and since 2013 again in Belarus. Her books, written in the manner of documentary prose, have been translated into 20 languages, she has received numerous literary awards in the Soviet Union and Russia, then Herder's, Remarque's, the American National Critic's Award, the Central European "Angelus" literary award, and in 2015 the Nobel Prize for literature for "multivocal creativity - a monument to the suffering and heroism of our time". She is the author of the books "I left the village", "War has no female face", "Bewitched by death", "Chernobyl prayer", "Last witnesses - not at all children's stories" and "Second hand time". She also wrote twenty scripts for documentaries and three dramas.
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