Name: Ogenj
Price: 27 EUR
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9789612983208

Fire

Ogenj

Based on the life of Štefka Cobelj

Aleš Šteger

Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 2025
Number of pages:: 224
Available reading materials:: English sample translation

The novel Fire draws on archival documents and testimonies about the life story of the partisan, and later Yugoslav government representative abroad, curator, and museum director, Štefka Cobelj. The novel artistically transforms the specific story of one of Ptuj's most controversial personalities into a metaphor for the 20th century and the social processes of that time. It is difficult to find a comparison in Slovene literature for the depicted literary character of a tragic defiant and rebel. With its innovative structure and sliding narrative perspective, the novel also questions a fundamental dilemma of literature, namely the ability of fiction to reconstruct a historical truth. This is a novel about the rise and fall of communist Yugoslavia, about the internal paradoxes, contradictions, and tragic collapse of one of the greatest sociopolitical experiments in 20th-century Europe. Ogenj is a fresco of time, a fresco of the city of Ptuj (which could be any city), a fresco of collective erasure, a fresco of a revolution that ultimately devours its own children. It is possible only on the horizon of a utopia of abstract ideas and desires, but in the real world, it inevitably turns into fire and ash.

Besides the importance of the intervention into today's social reality that Šteger's Ogenj brings, the novel is also significant due to its deep existential vision. It constantly points to humanity's destructive need to fix things, to give them ideological meaning, to assume an identity, instead of understanding reality as changeable and elusive. The previously mentioned ideas also speak of this in their foundational texts, be they sacred or theoretical. In the fire of this passion to fix the illusion that we can completely control the world, states, archives, and memories then burn.

This is one of the most important Slovenian novels of recent years, and it is recommended reading in today's crisis of ethics and ideas.

Muanis Sinanović, Ars
Štefka Cobelj is a unique historical figure, within whom a series of breakthrough forces converged, interrupting the anonymous work of the banal causality of historical continuity, interrupting the succession of time. And the novel Ogenj is not merely a retrospective interpretation of a historical figure, as it rounds off the past, in fact, into the "here and now," when, with a series of metaphorical chronological condensations, it writes out the corporeal image of Štefka Cobelj in the writer's absolute present. Šteger creates a novelistic present through the images of a wounded girl who believed in the revolution, renounced the Catholic faith, joined the partisans, and was three times sentenced to death, though the execution was never carried out. And the novel opens up the possibility for her forgotten story to begin anew with the help of an exciting literary (re)construction.

Nina Jerman, Televizija Slovenija
The novel transcends the documentary level and deals with the rift between those who participated in the revolution and those who today only reflect on it, interpret it, or mythologize it. It is not merely that Šteger exposes the mechanisms of historical memory, but rather that he shows how quickly national pride or a revolution can become a backdrop behind which violence, exclusion, and manipulation hide. The novel opens up space for doubt: about the possibility of a single, clear story, about the reliability of memory, and about the power of literary narrative, which is an attempt at preservation and at the same time an erasure.

Ogenj is not merely a novel about one forgotten woman, but a novel about systems of forgetting, about mechanisms of exclusion, and about an attempt to ensure that something remains through the story. And in this sense, Ogenj is also a novel about ourselves: about our capacity to look away, and at the same time about our duty to nevertheless look back.

Gabriela Babnik, Air Beletrina
In broad strokes, yet with extraordinary sensibility and attention to detail, the author presents the entire life of this controversial figure, stretched between Ptuj, Belgrade, and travels all over the world, which is at the same time "a fresco of collective erasure, a fresco of a revolution that ultimately devours its own children." Therefore, it is also a story about belonging, about fire and ash, which can quickly become the story of anyone who is not entirely one of us. Thank you, Aleš, for this exceptional work! I warmly recommend this novel for reading!

dr. Vesna Mikolič, professor at the University of Trieste