Yesterday, October 5, 2017, Giorgio Pressburger died. He was an immense talent and he was also my friend. I think it was in 2006 while teaching at the Hamburg Film School when I happened upon a bookstore located in the Altona train station. I enjoy perusing bookstores like that since I often find novels by authors with whom I’m unfamiliar. Such was the case with Pressburger. I believe the novel was The Law of White Spaces (1992). A slim novel of five stories that lyrically captured such themes as illness, instability, and death. After reading it, I quickly followed it by reading Teeth and Spies (2000) and Snow and Guilt (2000) both of which were published by Granta. It wasn’t long after that when I decided to invite Pressburger to the John Fowles Center and I must have gotten his address from Granta though I’m not exactly sure at this point.
Pressburger was a multifarious writer, a writer whose work includes fiction, film, radio, television, theatre even opera. He was born in Budapest and escaped with his parents to Italy after the failed Hungarian revolution in 1956. He had become one of the most esteemed Italian writers of his generation. For many years, he and his twin brother, Nicola, were a writing team (they collaborated on Homage to the Eighth District: Tales from Budapest) until the latter’s death in 1985.
In 2009, Pressburger came to speak at Chapman University along with his wife, Viviana. When they arrived, I was taken by their warmth and gratitude for the invitation though I was more humbled by his willingness to travel from Trieste to speak at the Fowles Center and, I think, at UCLA and the Los Angeles Italian Institute of Culture. Because he felt more comfortable reading in Italian than in English, I read the translation. I think it was one of the first times students had heard a novel read in Italian and whether they understood the language or not, I think they appreciated the lyricism and what he had to say when he spoke of his life in his Hungarian English. Because of that, I invited him back again in 2011 and again in 2013 though he had to cancel at that time because of illness.
In 2014, he invited me to Trieste and I stayed in an apartment of theirs for about a week. We spent a lot of time chatting about his work especially his last novel, Nel Regno Oscuro (In the Dark Kingdom, 2008) a work that is shaped after Dante's Inferno, “populated by people imprisoned, killed, tortured, forced to suicide: large and small figures of the twentieth century that reveal the secret of their suffering and death.” Unfortunately, it hasn’t been published in English, but the Italian reviews have acclaimed that it is his finest work. Like his best friend, Claudio Magris, Pressburger hasn’t been justly recognized in the US for his exceptional talents. For example, his I racconti triestini (Trieste Stories, 2015) hasn’t been translated into English either and his documentary, L’orologio di Monaco (Munich’s Clock, 2014) directed by Mauro Caputo, based on a collection of his short stories and which is narrated by Pressburger himself, hasn’t be transcribed to NTSC.
Perhaps, these artistic injustices compel me to invite writers such as Pressburger in order to have their work heard and/or seen as a way of educating a sometimes too parochial audience of the kinds of things that are written outside the United States. I will miss Giorgio, his friendship, his wit and his warmth. He was 81.