Ilija Trojanow: The Lamentations of Zeno
The discussion in English will be moderated by Patrick Fortmann, Professor of Germanic Studies at UIC.
The European Book Club (organized by the Goethe-Institut Chicago and EUNIC Chicago) meets regularly for a book discussion of a bestselling novel in English translation.
Guests who would like to attend, should read the book in advance and come prepared to participate in the discussion.
Zeno Hintermeier is a scientist working as a travel guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, encouraging the wealthy to marvel at the least explored continent and to open their eyes to its rapid degradation. It is a troubling turn in the life of an idealistic glaciologist. Now in his early sixties, Zeno bewails the loss of his beloved glaciers, the disintegration of his marriage, and the foundering of his increasingly irrelevant career. Troubled in conscience and goaded by the smug complacency of the passengers in his charge, he starts to plan a desperate gesture that will send a wake-up call to an overheating world.
© Ilija Trojanow
Ilija Trojanow was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1965. In 1971 his family fled Bulgaria to Germany, where they received political asylum. In 1972 the family travelled on to Kenya, where Ilija's father had obtained a job as engineer. With one interruption from 1977–1981, Ilija Trojanow lived in Nairobi until 1984, and attended the German School Nairobi. After a stay in Paris, he studied law and ethnology at Munich University. He interrupted these studies to found Kyrill-und-Method-Verlag in 1989, and after that Marino-Verlag in 1992, both of which specialised in African literature. In 1999 Trojanow moved to Mumbai and became intensely involved with Indian life and culture. He currently resides in Vienna.
Since 2002 Ilija Trojanow has been member of the PEN centre of the Federal Republic of Germany. Among many other awards he received the Bertelsmann Literature Prize at the Ingeborg Bachmann competition in Klagenfurt in 1995, and the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the category of fiction for his novel "Der Weltensammler" (The Collector of Worlds) in 2006.
In 2013 Trojanow criticized the National Security Agency (NSA).In the same year he was denied entry into the USA for undisclosed reasons.
Patrick Fortmann earned his Ph.D. from Harvard and he is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
He works in the long nineteenth century and is particularly interested in questions of sovereignty, emotion, and the nation.
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