Presented in partnership with the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation and Verso Books
German-Bulgarian novelist and travel writer
Ilija Trojanow talks about and reads from his novel
The Lamentations of Zeno (Verso Books, 2016), a gripping story about climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the Antarctic, translated into English by Philip Boehm. In conversation with
Paige West, Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Trojanow discusses different forms of writing about climate disaster, including literary fiction, travel writing, academic research, and science journalism.
The Lamentations of Zeno is a portrait of a man in extremis, a haunting and at times irreverent tale that approaches the greatest challenge of our age from an impassioned human angle. 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.
Read about Torjanow's journey to the Antarctic and how he wrote his novel in the Goethe-Institut Forum for Culture and Climate Change.
Ilija Trojanow was born in Sofia in 1965. In 1971 his parents fled with him through Yugoslavia and Italy to Germany, where they gained political asylum in Munich. A year later, the family moved to Kenya where his father worked as an engineer. Since then Trojanow has lived in Paris, Munich, Mumbai, and Cape Town. From 1984 to 1989 he studied law and ethnology in Munich, where he also founded the Marino Publishing House that specialized in African literature. Today he lives in Vienna, Austria. Trojanow is the author of many books of fiction and non-fiction, including
The Collector of Worlds (2008),
Along the Ganges (2005), and
Mumbai to Mecca (2007). His autobiographical debut novel was adapted into the award-winning film
The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Just Around the Corner (2008). In 2006 he received the Leipzig Book Fair Prize in the category Fiction. Other literary awards include the Bertelsmann-Literaturpreis in 1995, the 1996 Marburger Literaturpreis, and the 2000 Adalbert von Chamisso Prize. His books have been translated into Spanish, Russian, Czech, Bulgarian, Dutch and English. A vocal critic of domestic surveillance and the NSA, Trojanow was at the center of a cause célèbre in 2013 when the United States refused him entry. This spring, Trojanow is Max Kade Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College.
Paige West is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and chair of the department of anthropology at Barnard College. Her scholarly interest is in the relationship between societies and their environments. Among other things, she has written about the linkages between environmental conservation and international development, the material and symbolic ways in which the natural world is lived and produced, and the aesthetics and poetics of human social relations with nature. In her current research she examines how epistemic practice and ontological proposition are related to climate change, focusing on people living in island communities, scientists studying global warming, and politicians and policy makers in three countries. In a second project she studies the relationship between dispossession and material culture, paying special attention to Malagan objects from New Ireland, Papua New Guinea. West’s books include
Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea (in Press, September 2016),
From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea (2012) and
Conservation is our Government now: The Politics of Ecology in Papua New Guinea (2006). She is also the founder and editor of the journal
Environment and Society.
Reviews of The Lamentations of Zeno
“
The Lamentations of Zeno is electric, irresistible, well written and movingly topical. Ilija Trojanow, with several masterpieces to his name, never puts a foot wrong. He is as important a writer in this day and age as Gunter Grass was for his—a joy to read.” ― Nuruddin Farah, author of
Hiding in Plain Sight
“Thrilling, nuanced, and chillingly meditative . . . Ilija Trojanow has written a modern fable tinged with absurd humor, dramatizing the high stakes of our current climate gamble.” ― Colum McCann, author of
Let the Great World Spin
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