On The Gold Coast
ABOUT
THE BOOK
On the Gold Coast is a complex and multilayered novel set in West Africa in 1980. Six Europeans – a young man in search of his missing father, two couples in search of a solution to their marital problems, and a mysterious young woman who keeps changing her identity – follow the trail described in the famous travel memoir White Rider, Black Horse. Its author, Igor Hladnik has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind only the unfinished manuscript of his last African journey (also undertaken along the trail of his previous jorney). Mysteries pile up as the travellers’ paths cross and re-cross, leading them to the Gold Coast. Through Cameroon, Nigeria, Niger, Upper Volta and Ghana, they follow in each other’s footsteps, unaware that the mysterious Adriana is playing with their lives and weaving the threads of their experiences into a fateful tapestry to escape her inner emptiness. Inspired by the descriptions in Hladnik’s books, they find their encounter with the real Africa blurred, almost obscured, or, rather, distorted by the power of literature and the visual media which influence, even dictate their perceptions.
ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Timothy
Pogacar
Timothy Pogačar received a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Kansas and undergraduate degrees in Russian and Spanish from Georgetown University. He has translated widely from Russian and Slovene, completing eight Slovene-English book-length translations since 2013, the most recent of which is Ivan Tavčar’s Visoko Chronicle. Current research is on fiction in émigré newspapers and sound preferences for characters’ names. Pogačar has edited the journal Slovene Studies since 1986. At Bowling Green SU, he teaches all levels of Russian language and courses on Russian culture, post-communist Russia, and Eastern Europe.
Timothy Pogačar received a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Kansas and undergraduate degrees in Russian and Spanish from Georgetown University. He has translated widely from Russian and Slovene, completing eight Slovene-English book-length translations since 2013, the most recent of which is Ivan Tavčar’s Visoko Chronicle. Current research is on fiction in émigré newspapers and sound preferences for characters’ names. Pogačar has edited the journal Slovene Studies since 1986. At Bowling Green SU, he teaches all levels of Russian language and courses on Russian culture, post-communist Russia, and Eastern Europe.
NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS
The novel On the Gold Coast was shortlisted for Kresnik (the Slovene national award for the best novel of 2010). Not a single thing in this ambitiously interwoven African story turns out to be what it appears to be. Secrets and mysteries, real and imagined, chief among them the source of our desperate urge to take control of life instead of remaining its plaything, are resolved only at the very end, when apparent fragments are retrospectively joined into an unexpected whole. (Slovenian Book Agency)