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"A world without truth would be immensely sad," states the
magistrate in the murder trial of local boy, Janek. A young man
with serious mental issues, Janek's strange `chestnut crown' -
woven from the leaves of a supposedly sacred tree - was found on
the body of the farmer Geder; stabbed to death with a bread knife.
Through a series of flashbacks during the interrogations, we learn
of Janek's story: from the perversion of his relationship with his
mother, to the frustrations of his love affair with Daria and his
inability to complete his studies or free himself from the ghosts
of this past.
A collision between contemporary poetics and the Renaissance
lyric, between aestheticism and political engagement, "The Master
of Insomnia" is a collection of Slovenian poet Boris A. Novak's
verse from the last fifteen years, including numerous poems never
before available in English. In these sensitive translations, Novak
stands revealed as both innovator and observer; as critic Aleš
Debeljak has written: "The poet's power in bearing witness to
Sarajevo and Dalmatia, to his childhood room and his retired
father, to the indifferent passage of time and the desperate pain
of loss, confirms the melancholy clairvoyance of Walter Benjamin,
who stated that what is essential hides in the marginal, negligent,
and hardly observed details. Whoever strives to see the 'big
picture' will inevitably overlook the essential... Novak's]
wide-open eyes must watch over both the beauty of this life and the
horror of its destruction."
My Father's Dreams: A Tale of Innocence Abused, is a controversial
and shocking novel by Slovenia's bestselling author Evald Flisar,
and is regarded by many critics as his best. The book tells the
story of fourteen-year-old Adam, the only son of a village doctor
and his quiet wife, living in apparent rural harmony. But this is a
topsy-turvy world of illusions and hopes, in which the author plays
with the function of dreaming and story-telling to present the
reader with an eccentric 'bildungsroman' in reverse. Spiced with
unusual and original overtones of the grotesque, the history of an
insidious deception is revealed, in which the unsuspecting son and
his mother will be the apparent victims; and yet who can tell
whether the gruesome end is reality or just another dream - This is
a novel that can be read as an off-beat crime story, a
psychological horror tale, a dream-like morality fable, or as a
dark and ironic account of one man's belief that his personality
and his actions are two different things. It can also be read as a
story about a boy who has been robbed of his childhood in the
cruelest way. It is a book which has the force of myth: revealing
the fundamentals without drawing any particular attention to them;
an investigation into good and evil, and our inclination to be
drawn to the latter.
Slovenes, (the people who form ) a nation of two million in the
heart of Europe, achieved independence for the first time in their
long history with the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991. Having
settled in the Alps in the sixth century AD, they succeeded in
preserving their language, identity and culture largely through
poetry and fiction: their greatest national hero is not a general
but a romantic poet. With the arrival of independent statehood and
membership of the European Union and NATO, Slovenian literature has
been freed of its function as the guardian of national identity and
is now allowed to explore the realm of literary imagination without
the former burdens of attendant duties. While not ignoring their
great literary tradition of the past centuries, contemporary
Slovenian authors no longer concern themselves predominantly with
national issues; their writing is personal, inventive and open
outward, even cosmopolitan, yet without losing its specific Central
European flavor. The thirteen stories by thirteen leading Slovenian
authors selected for this anthology have all it takes to make the
reader turn the pages: style, suspense, irony, dark secrets,
intellectual game playing, emotional charge, human warmth, and
more.
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