A01=Irena Brezna
A01=Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
assimilation
Author_Irena Brezna
Author_Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp
automatic-update
Category1=Fiction
Category=FA
Category=FB
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
easteurope
easteuropeanliterature
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
germanliterature
immigrantexperience
immigrantion
juliasherwood
Language_English
PA=Available
postcommunism
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
seagullb
slolia
slovakfiction
Slovakia
slovakliterature
Slovaknovel
softlaunch
swissliterature
theslovaklist
translatedliterature
translation
Product details
- ISBN 9781803090818
- Weight: 320g
- Dimensions: 194 x 275mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jan 2023
- Publisher: Seagull Books London Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
A novel that offers a timely and important viewpoint on the immigration experience about the need for resistance to blind assimilation in a host country.
In 1968, in search of a better world, a young person flees her country and ends up in Switzerland, the land of hard cheese. There she’s told not to talk nonsense, or not to “talk cheese,” as they say in the local dialect. Home is where you can grumble, but here you have to be grateful. Her new environs seem unwieldy, aloof, and she rebels against this host country that insists on her following its rules, that won’t let her be herself. But as an interpreter, she meets many others who have ended up here—petty criminals, depressives, hustlers, refugees, victims of exploitation, and others who have gone out of their way to assimilate, people who share a hope that they can make something new of their lives. Gradually she learns to experience the richness of exile and foreignness, to build bridges between cultures. A brilliantly written novel about the search for identity between assimilation and resistance, Irena Brežná’s The Thankless Foreigner is a significant addition to the important literature of immigrant experience.
In 1968, in search of a better world, a young person flees her country and ends up in Switzerland, the land of hard cheese. There she’s told not to talk nonsense, or not to “talk cheese,” as they say in the local dialect. Home is where you can grumble, but here you have to be grateful. Her new environs seem unwieldy, aloof, and she rebels against this host country that insists on her following its rules, that won’t let her be herself. But as an interpreter, she meets many others who have ended up here—petty criminals, depressives, hustlers, refugees, victims of exploitation, and others who have gone out of their way to assimilate, people who share a hope that they can make something new of their lives. Gradually she learns to experience the richness of exile and foreignness, to build bridges between cultures. A brilliantly written novel about the search for identity between assimilation and resistance, Irena Brežná’s The Thankless Foreigner is a significant addition to the important literature of immigrant experience.
Irena Brežná was born in 1950 in Bratislava, formerly Czechoslovakia, and emigrated to Switzerland in 1968. She is a journalist, writer, Slavicist, psychologist, human rights activist, and the author of ten books. Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp is a literary translator working from German, Russian and Arabic into English.
