US Book Tour for ‘La Superba’ by Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

Thu, Mar 17 - Thu, Mar 24  2016

From March 18 until 24, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer will give several book presentations about ‘La Superba’. ‘La Superba‘ is Pfeijffer’s masterpiece, and was greeted with unanimous acclaim, including the most prominent recognition with the Libris Literature Prize 2014, the Netherlands’ most prestigious literary award, and the Tzum Prize, awarded for ‘the most beautiful sentence of the year’, which he has now won twice. ‘La Superba’ is a classic, wide-ranging, engaged novel, a rambling, bizarre, hilarious, touching Rabelaisian epic from a true master of language.

About La Superba

The novel is set in Genoa, the labyrinthine port city (nicknamed ‘the Superb’) where the author has been living for the past five years. Migration is the central theme of this autobiographical story about a writer who becomes trapped in his walk on the wild side.

‘Emigrating is like writing a new novel, without yet knowing the plot, the ending, nor even the characters that will turn out to be crucial to the progress of the story,’ says Ilja Leonardo Pfeijffer, the self-confident ‘Italophile’ who addresses us in La Superba. In a long letter home he reports on his life as an explorer in Genoa and contrasts his fate with that of the dirt poor migrant workers from Africa who can barely keep their heads above water.La Superba is more than a touching story about fortune seekers who fall through the cracks. The novel starts with the discovery, by the narrator, of a woman’s leg on the street. That leg will pop up repeatedly in his search for ‘the most beautiful girl in Genoa’, a quest that brings him into contact with the prostitutes, locals and outsiders of the port’s rougher districts and seaman’s bars. This is a pocket edition of Dante’s Inferno, written by an author who admits that he likes to exaggerate: ‘Let’s call it an exercise in style. But the fact that I exaggerate doesn’t mean what I say is untrue.’

Eventually the main character becomes hopelessly lost in his own fantasies, leaving his readers with the feeling they have been hallucinating while roaming through a metropolis. The destination was irrelevant; it was the journey that mattered. And anyone in danger of losing the thread could cling to the style of their guide, to those dynamic sentences full of depravity and high contemplation that Pfeijffer has produced in such quantities since his award-winning debut novel.

About Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer

Classicist Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer (b. 1968) made his debut with the poetry collection ‘van de vierkante man’ (of the square man, 1999), an homage to the experimental poetry of his great models, Pindar and Lucebert. In the years that followed, in addition to poetry, he wrote stage plays, essays, columns, travel accounts, stories, political satires and four novels written in the spirit of Rabelais. In ‘Het grote baggerboek’ (The Big Book of Dredgings, 2004) and ‘Het ware leven, een roman’ (Real Life: A Novel, 2006) he played a game with world literature and divided the critics. ‘La Superba’ shows Pfeijffer’s engaged side, and it has been greeted with unanimous enthusiasm.

Dates

March 18 | 7.00PM | The Dallas Insitute, Dallas, TX
March 19 | 7.00PM | Brazos Bookstore, Houston, TX
March 21 | 6.30PM | Kramerbooks, Washington, DC
March 22 | 7.00PM | Community Bookstore, Brooklyn
March 24 | 6.30PM | The Netherland Club of New York, NYC