Name: Menuet za kitaro
Price: 29 EUR
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9789612980313

Minuet for Guitar

Menuet za kitaro

Vitomil Zupan

Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 1975
Number of pages:: 426
Rights sold:: Germany (Guggolz Verlag), Italy (Voland Edizioni), Spain (Sajalín Editores), USA (Dalkey Archive Press)
Available reading materials:: English pdf, German pdf, Spanish pdf, Italian pdf

Minuet for Guitar is an intense exploration of the horrors of war, of morality and of historical forces propelling men this way and that. Using his life experiences for much of the action in the novel, Zupan introduces us to Jakob Bergant Berk, a man lost in two places and times. Slip-sliding between occupied Slovenia in the 1940s and a Spanish resort in the 1970s, we move from harrowing wartime guerrilla fighting to Berk’s curious encounter with Joseph Bitter, a former German soldier, on vacation in Spain. In the war, Berk is an apolitical non-conformist swept along by events over which he has little control, and some thirty years later, still traumatised by his wartime experiences, he tries to make sense of his memories in discussions with his old enemy Bitter. Once rumoured that it was used by the CIA as a manual for guerrilla warfare, Minuet for Guitar is a powerful examination of war on par with Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, a modern Slovenian classic filled with philosophical ruminations and told in Zupan’s casual, ironic and seductive voice.

“War is also a dance. The war dance has begun, they say. A minuet. Accompanied by a twenty-five-shot guitar.”

Many nations, no matter how small, have produced great war literature. American classics like "A Farewell to Arms" and "Catch-22" have a Slovenian equivalent in Vitomil Zupan's 1975 masterpiece, "Minuet for Guitar," about a young partisan named Berk eager to battle German invaders during World War II.

Wall Street Journal
Zupan’s literary gifts are on full display in passages that range from startlingly lyrical to graphically realistic, achingly surrealistic to boldly philosophical. An intensely imagined exploration of war.

Publishers Weekly
Minuet’s resolution, to the degree that it does resolve, occurs in the shadow of perspective. It is the resolution of convalescence, of being made whole again in the awareness that in war the only difference between men is the colour of their uniform, the direction in which they are told to point their guns. As Berk observes, “War was cruel and innocent at the same time… It is a dance, accompanied by a 25-shot guitar.”

MAKE Literary Magazine

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