A diary recounting four decades' worth of sexual exploits, the memoir of a mental institution attendant, and a familiar-looking bicycle dredged out of a river--the discovery of these artifacts sends an archivist on an obsessive quest to discover their owners' identities and fates. Shifting between Slovenia's postcommunist present and its wartime occupation by the Axis powers, The Tree with No Name is Drago Jancar's masterpiece: a compelling and universally significant story of an individual confronting the constraints set on truth by his--and every--culture.
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A diary recounting four decades' worth of sexual exploits, the memoir of a mental institution attendant, and a familiar-looking bicycle dredged out of a river--the discovery of these artifacts sends an archivist on an obsessive quest to discover their owners' identities and fates. Shifting between Slovenia's postcommunist present and its wartime occupation by the Axis powers, The Tree with No Name is Drago Jancar's masterpiece: a compelling and universally significant story of an individual confronting the constraints set on truth by his--and every--culture.
"Jančar, one of Slovenia's foremost writers, skillfully infuses even the most mundane events with foreboding, dread and paranoia" – Publishers Weekly
"As a novelist and a master of short prose, Jančar reveals deep human social and psychological traumas and -- like his Central European literary and spiritual relatives, Franz Kafka, Gunter Grass, or Milan Kundera -- finds no escape from the unclear, primal, and evil human lot... A unique, ethically sensitive, and politically independent thinker." -- Slavic and East European Journal