A Difficult Spring, Boris Pahor

(Litterae Slovenicae 2-3, 2009, 124-125)

A Difficult Spring (Spopad s pomladjo) is the second of Boris Pahor’s three literary works about the experience of Triestine Slovenians in wartime Europe. The novel tells the story of the release of a concentration camp prisoner after World War Two. Following his release, he is diagnosed with tuberculosis and stays in a French sanatorium where he falls in love with a trite and pretty young nurse whose capriciousness strikes him as a betrayal of the camps and all who died there, and yet also as the very source of life.