In two parallel narratives – one earthly strand detailing the growing paranoia of our reluctant hero and the other, more heavenly one of Tobias Keller, the Moral Issues Adviser with the Office of the Great Overseer – the plot develops in the atmospheric style of Kafka and Bulgakov as Tobias discusses the life path of Moritz with the Disciplinary Committee. As the pieces of the puzzle finally come together and the connection between the two storylines becomes clearer, Todorović, mixing philosophy with first-class story-telling, coaxes us towards a surprising finale.
PREVIOUS SEASONS IN THE
PETER OWEN WORLD SERIES
Season 1: Slovenia
Evald Flisar, Three Loves, One Death
Jela Krečič, None Like Her
Dušan Šarotar, Panorama
Season 2: Spain (Castilian)
Cristina Fernández Cubas, Nona’s Room
Julio Llamazares, Wolf Moon
José Ovejero, Inventing Love
PETER OWEN WORLD SERIES
SEASON 1: SLOVENIA
JELA KREČIČ
None Like Her
Translated by Olivia Hellewell
978-0-7206-1911-9 / 288pp
Matjaž is fearful of losing his friends over his obsession with his ex-girlfriend. To prove that he has moved on from his relationship with her, he embarks on an odyssey of dates around Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. In this comic and romantic tale a chapter is devoted to each new encounter and adventure. The women he selects are wildly different from one another, and the interactions of the characters are perspicuously and memorably observed.
Their preoccupations – drawn with coruscating dialogue – will speak directly to Generation Y, and in Matjaž, the hero, Jela Krečič has created a well-observed crypto-misogynist of the twenty-first century whose behaviour she offers up for the reader’s scrutiny.
EVALD FLISAR
Three Loves, One Death
Translated by David Limon
978-0-7206-1930-0 / 208pp
A family move from the city to the Slovenian countryside. The plan is to restore and make habitable a large, dilapidated farmhouse. Then the relatives arrive. There’s Cousin Vladimir, a former Partisan writing his memoirs, Uncle Vinko, an accountant who would like to raise the largest head of cabbage and appear in the Guinness World Records, Aunt Mara and her illegitimate daughter Elizabeta who’s hell bent on making her first sexual encounter the ‘event of the century’. And, finally, Uncle Švejk, the accidental hero of the war for independence, turns up out of the blue one Sunday afternoon …
Evald Flisar handles the absurd events that follow like no other writer, making the smallest incidents rich in meaning. The house, the family, their competing instincts and desires provide an unlikely vehicle for Flisar’s commentary on the nature of social cohesion and freedom.
DUŠAN ŠAROTAR
Panorama
Translated by Rawley Grau
978-0-7206-1922-5 / 208pp
Deftly blending fiction, history and journalism, Dušan Šarotar takes the reader on a deeply reflective yet kaleidoscopic journey from northern to southern Europe. In a manner reminiscent of W.G. Sebald, he supplements his engrossing narrative with photographs, which help to blur the lines between fiction and journalism. The writer’s experience of landscape is bound up in a personal yet elusive search for self-discovery, as he and a diverse group of international fellow travellers relate in their distinctive and memorable voices their unique stories and common quest for somewhere they might call home.
PETER OWEN WORLD SERIES
SEASON 2: SPAIN
CRISTINA FERNÁNDEZ CUBAS
Nona’s Room
Translated by Kathryn Phillips-Miles and Simon Deefholts
978-0-7206-1953-9 / 160pp
A young girl envious of the attention given to her sister has a brutal awakening. A young woman facing eviction puts her trust in an old lady who invites her into her home. A mature woman checks into a hotel in Madrid and finds herself in a time warp … In this prize-winning new collection Cristina Fernández Cubas takes us through a glass darkly into a world where things are never quite what they seem, and lurking within each of these six suspenseful short stories is an unexpected surprise. Nona’s Room is the latest offering from one of Spain’s finest contemporary writers.
JULIO LLAMAZARES
Wolf Moon
Translated by Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles
978-0-7206-1945-4 / 192pp
Defeated by Franco’s Nationalists, four Republican fugitives flee into the Cantabrian Mountains at the end of the Spanish Civil War. They are on the run, skirmishing with the Guardia Civil, knowing that surrender means death. Wounded and hungry, they are frequently drawn from the safety of the wilderness into the villages they once inhabited, not only risking their lives but those of sympathizers helping them. Faced with the lonely mountains, harsh winters and unforgiving summers, it is only a matter of time before they are hunted down. Llamazares’s lyrical prose vividly animates the wilderness, making the Spanish landscape as much a witness to the brutal oppression of the period as the persecuted villagers and Republicans.
Published in 1985, Wolf Moon was the first novel that centred on the Spanish Maquis to be published in Spain after Franco’s death in 1975.
JOSÉ OVEJERO
Inventing Love
Translated by Simon Deefholts and Kathryn Phillips-Miles
978-0-7206-1949-2 / 224pp
Samuel leads a comfortable but uninspiring existence in Madrid, consoling himself among friends who have reached a similar point in life. One night he receives a call. Clara, his lover, has died in a car accident. The thing is, he doesn’t know anyone called Clara.
A simple case of mistaken identity offers Samuel the chance to inhabit another, more tumultuous life, leading him to consider whether, if he invents a past of love and loss, he could even attend her funeral. Unable to resist the chance, Samuel finds himself drawn down a path of lies until he begins to have trouble distinguishing between truth and fantasy. But such is the allure of his invented life that he is willing to persist and in the process create a new version of the present – with little regard for the consequences to himself and to others.
José Ovejero’s existential tale of stolen identity exposes the fictions people weave to sustain themselves in a dehumanizing modern world.
Fear and His Servant Page 25
