Pressburger, Giorgio 1937-

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PRESSBURGER, Giorgio 1937-

PERSONAL:

Born 1937, in Budapest, Hungary.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, Granta, 2/3 Hanover Yard, Noel Road, London N1 8BE, England.

CAREER:

Author and film and theater director. Institute of Italian Culture, Hungary, director. Director of operas, including Strauss's Elektra, in Taormina, Sicily; Baggiani's Perso per Perso, in Florence, Italy; and Enzensberger's The Great Migration, in Friuli, Italy.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Independent Foreign Fiction Award, 1992, for The Law of White Spaces.

WRITINGS:

(With brother, Nicola Pressburger) Storie dell' ottavo distretto, Marietti (Casale Monferrato, Italy), 1986, translation by Gerald Moore published as Homage to the Eighth District: Tales from Budapest, Readers International (Columbia, LA), 1990.

(With brother, Nicola Pressburger) L'elefante verde, Marsilio (Genova, Italy), 1987, translation by Piers Spence published as The Green Elephant, Quartet Books (London, England), 1994.

Il sussurro della grande voce, Rizzoli (Milan, Italy), 1990.

The Law of White Spaces, translated by Piers Spence, Pantheon Books (New York, NY), 1992.

La coscienza sensibile, Rizzoli (Milan, Italy), 1992.

Denti e spie, Rizzoli (Milan, Italy), 1994, translation by Shaun Whiteside published as Teeth and Spies, Granta (London, England), 1999.

I due Gemelli, Rizzoli (Milan, Italy), 1996.

La neve e la colpa, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1998, translation by Shaun Whiteside published as Snow and Guilt, Granta (London, England), 2000.

Di vento e di fuoco (title means "Of Wind and Fire"), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 2000.

L'orologio di Monaco, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 2003.

Sulia fede, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 2004.

Also author of Twins, translated by Marguerite Pozzoli, 1998. Contributor of short stories to periodicals.

SIDELIGHTS:

Giorgio Pressburger and his twin brother Nicola were born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1937. At the age of nineteen, they immigrated to Italy, where Giorgio began working as a theater and television director and wrote in his free time. The brothers wrote two books together before Nicola passed away and Giorgio continued to write on his own. Much of their writing addresses questions of identity and destiny.

The second collaboration between Giorgio and Nicola Pressburger, The Green Elephant, combines fiction with autobiography. The book recounts the experiences of a Hungarian-Jewish family from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through the flight of the grandsons to Italy at the age of nineteen. The book portrays each generation of the family struggling against economic hardship and persecution. One character, Jom Tow, makes sausages, and his wife, Esther, runs a market stall selling geese. Jom is content until a rabbi interprets his dream of a green elephant as a prediction that his house will produce prodigies. Jom assumes his son Isaac will fulfill the rabbi's prophecy, but the war brings harsh anti-Semitic persecution that makes simple survival a challenge. In the end, Isaac's greatest achievement is to ensure that his sons are able to escape the country, very much reflecting the Pressburgers' flight from Hungary in 1956. Maritzina Caltagirone commented in the Times Literary Supplement that The Green Elephant "puts forward a paradoxical interpretation, that on one level 'our personalities are not really relevant in the scheme of great events,' but on the other, we can neither rid ourselves of the burdens of personal identity."

Giorgio Pressburger's solo effort, The Law of White Spaces, is a collection of five stories, supposedly based on medical case histories that were relayed to the author by an historian. The premise is that with these cases, the true meaning lies in the white spaces between the facts of their maladies. Village Voice writer James Marcus commented that Pressburger's "prose lacks the philosophical agility of, say, Primo Levi or Oliver Sacks, which allows them to put a humane spin on even the most laboratory-bound materials." On the other hand, critic W. S. Di Piero, in the New York Times Book Review, wrote that Pressburger's tales "are saturated with unhappiness and disillusionment. They pick away at the absurd and devastating inadequacies of what we think we know. But Mr. Pressburger has the deft comic touch of an Isaac Bashevis Singer." A contributor for Publishers Weekly also praised the book, remarking that Pressburger "provides a fascinating and often frightening look at the human condition."

Teeth and Spies recounts the life of S. G., a Hungarian Jew. His teeth form the structure of the story: each chapter is delineated by tooth and location, followed by the details of a particular event. S. G. tells the reader how his father carried one of his baby teeth with him when he was sent to a concentration camp and continues through the history of his mouth until he is old and wearing dentures. As his life is revealed, so are his secrets, including the fact that he was a secret agent. Rufus S. Crane, in a review for World Literature Today, remarked that "we get to know the man through his reactions to every situation, be it a painful tooth extraction or an emotional physical encounter, and through his philosophical musings on the meaning of life." Times Literary Supplement contributor Kathleen Brunner wrote that "the story of the teeth of S. G.… relates the instincts and the drives of an individual 'ego' to the cataclysmic events that marked a generation."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January 15, 1993, Richard Paul Snyder, review of The Law of White Spaces, p. 879.

Library Journal, January, 1993, Olivia Opello, review of The Law of White Spaces, p. 168.

New York Times Book Review, February 28, 1993, W. S. Di Piero, review of The Law of White Spaces, p. 13.

Opera News, December 5, 1992, Fred Plotkin, review of Elektra, p. 64; March 8, 1997, Stephen Hastings, review of Perso per perso, p. 49.

Publishers Weekly, August 17, 1990, Penny Kaganoff, review of Homage to the Eighth District: Tales from Budapest, p. 64; November 30, 1992, review of The Law of White Spaces, p. 36.

Times Literary Supplement, December 23, 1994, Maritzina Caltagirone, review of The Green Elephant; June 18, 1999, Kathleen Brunner, review of Teeth and Spies, p. 27; September 29, 2000, D. J. Enright, review of Snow and Guilt.

Village Voice, April 27, 1993, James Marcus, review of The Law of White Spaces, p. 68.

Wall Street Journal, August 20, 1996, Frederika Randall, "MittelFest: Italy's Kulturkampf," p. A8.

World Literature Today, autumn, 1999, Rufus S. Crane, review of Teeth and Spies, p. 716.