Bøger af Evald Flisar

In 1969 a young Slovenian painter Vili Vaupotic arrives in London with the great hope that within two years his masterpieces will be exhibited in the Tate gallery, while he himself will be invited to the annual Queen's tea party for successful immigrants. (Sir William Wowpotitch?) Tea with the Queen is a bitter-sweet tale of lost illusions, rich with unexpected reversals and (self)reflections. The external narrative is merely a means whereby the author creates in front of the reader's eyes 'a stream of those aspects of reality that most people, because of their trivia-laden minds, no longer register'. The novel's admirable flow is interspersed with 'a cacophony of aggressive sounds' forcing their way into the minds of the characters from outside, revealing that 'the outside reality is kinder than the reality of our souls'. Tea with the Queen is thus a luxurious, vibrant story about eternal human fallibility, about our blindspots and hopes, mistakes and sorrows; in other words, as universal as a story can be. Thanks to the author's exceptional feeling for nuances, dialog and dramatic fabulation even such a long novel is a pleasure to read. In terms of narrative mastery, Tea with the Queen surpasses even the authorl's legendary Sorcerer's Apprentice, in the past 30 years the most widely read novel by any Slovenian writer.

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.

TEXTURE PRESSApril 2016A tragically misguided journey to the illusory concept of homeIn ancient Greece the fate of man was determined by the gods. In today's globalized world gods have been replaced by powerful individuals, mostly invisible, all-powerful and rarely well-meaning. Our "enchanted Odysseus", a man who after a surfing accident in Bali loses his memory and identity, is sent on a long journey home (back to himself as he was) through a series of tasks he has to perform in different countries. They are communicated to him by an Australian neurologist, supposedly his benefactor, who assures him that the tasks, including murder, are a part of his therapy. But nothing is what it seems. Our hero, who tells his story through a series of emails he sends to different people, either real or invented, largely to keep a record of his journey the details of which he keeps forgetting, presents a figure of contemporary everyman, lost in a world that has also lost its memory, and with it the meaning of existence. The dreamlike narrative enfolds the reader and drags him along by the force of incredible adventures, ruminations, and unexpected turnarounds all the way to the ending that doesn't resolve the mystery but only deepens it. Where in this world is Ithaca? Does it exist?

Evald Flisar's latest novel: smart, quick-witted, and inimitably tragic-comic.

A Swarm of Dust is one of Flisar's finest works of fiction, questioning the very notion of objective truth and subverting the norms of Judeo-Christian morality

A tale of innocence abused, 'My FAther's Dreams' is uniquely brave novel by one of Europe's greatest writers.