Evald Flisar

"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.

There are moments in the life of young Katarina when it seems to her that sailing through time she is gradually losing parts of herself, her soul and feelings, like a wooden boat shedding the damaged or rotten planks from which it was made, and that the lost planks are being replaced with new ones from another kind of wood. There's a growing, nagging fear that if this process continues, time will make a completely different person out of her, composed of unfamiliar material, which will undermine the image she has of herself and uses as a rudder while sailing through life. Will she then still be the Katarina she was before?At the same time she has the feeling that someone not necessarily of this world is accompanying her through life, gathering the lost planks, and reassembling from them her first self, built of memories and thoughts that belonged to the "original" Katarina, while the memories and thoughts of the "new" Katarina, built from other experiences, from a different understanding of those experiences, will become a kind of double, a Katarina #2. Will they be able to co-exist in the same space and time? Will they have conflicts, war with one another? Will one have to die for the other to live?

Part of the Peter Owen World Series. A new novel from internationally renowned author of My Father's Dreams. When a family move out to the countryside to restore a dilapidated farmhouse, progress is halted by the arrival of their chaotic relatives. Flisar handles the absurd events like no other writer, imbuing the smallest incidents with meaning.

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 In today's globalized world gods have been replaced by powerful individuals, mostly invisible, all-powerful and rarely well-meaning.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?

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.

Slovenian kansainvälisesti tunnetuimpiin kirjailijoihin kuuluvalta Evald Flisarilta (s. 1945) on ilmestynyt 2001 suomeksi buddhalaishenkinen romaani "Tietäjän oppipoika". Romaani "Isäni unet" kertoo 14-vuotiaasta Adamista, 15-vuotiaasta Evasta ja Adamin lääkäri-isästä, joka mainettaan suojellakseen alkaa uskotella pojalleen, että tämän näkemät eroottiset tapahtumat ovat unta. Flisar kuvaa kauhistuttavalla tavalla unen ja todellisuuden, valheen ja totuuden välisiä jännitteitä. Sloveenista suomentanut Kari Klemelä.