Name: Strah za metulje v nevihti
Price: 24 EUR
Availability: SoldOut
ISBN: 9789612840082

Fearful for Butterflies in the Storm

Strah za metulje v nevihti

Feri Lainšček

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Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 2014
Number of pages:: 210
Rights sold:: Bulgaria (Nauka i izkustvo)
Available reading materials:: English sample translation

Fearful for Butterflies in the Storm is an astonishing love story and an extraordinary literary testimony about life in Tito’s multi-ethnic Yugoslavia. The first part of the novel takes place in 1972, a time marked by some of the first nationalist manifestations and mass student demonstrations in the Socialist Yugoslavia, while the second part of the novel relates to events in 1991. The novel’s central figure is Marko, a Slovenian student who falls in love with a Serbian high school student during compulsory military service in the Yugoslav National Army. Lili and Marko’s fervent, forbidden love, interrupted at the time by a series of unfortunate circumstances, fatefully marks them forever. The young couple only meet again years later, in 1991, when Slovenia is already an independent country and the ethnic conflicts that led to the war in the Balkans are beginning to be felt throughout the rest of Yugoslavia.
The novel is not only a story about love, but also one of aspiring to freedom and democracy, and it proves to be a powerful metaphor against war. With its lyrical energy and archetypal frankness, it leads us to examine the fate of the individual in an ideologically burdened union and furthermore tells a universal story of humanity.

Love combined with nostalgia seems to be a winning combination – even those of us born after the break-up of Yugoslavia can feel the spirit of socialism that the novel is bursting with, while the story is surely even more immersive for the members of Marko Hribernik’s generation or those before it.

AirBeletrina
Fearful for Butterflies in the Storm is a novel in which the author’s style, as in I’ll Part the Foam from the Waves and Muriša, is convincingly appropriate to the spirit of the time it describes. More importantly, each part of the trilogy not only tells an individual love story, but also describes the universal human nature.

Bukla
If the author’s previous novels were set against a backdrop of the Mura River, flowing quietly and bearing omens of the main characters’ demise, the river’s role has now been taken by war, while the main characters have become metaphorical butterflies whose dance was unable to survive the brutal atmosphere of infighting.

Koridor