Name: Neverend
Price: 24 EUR
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9789612842871

Neverend

Aleš Šteger

Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 2017
Number of pages:: 464
Rights sold:: Czech Republic (Větrné mlýny), Germany (Wallstein Verlag)
Available reading materials:: German pdf, English sample translation

A poetic and socially critical novel about what might happen to all of us—if it hasn’t already.

These are tense times: because of the trade wars between the EU and the rest of the world, bananas are no longer on European supermarket shelves. In Slovenia, elections are just around the corner and chaotic conditions prevail in Ljubljana. Protests are only interrupted by counter-protests, and extremist parties are on the rise. The exercising of political power is becoming more and more shameless. Our protagonist, a young writer, is also in crisis. Her love life is a mess and her finances are worse. To remedy the latter, she accepts a temporary position leading creative writing workshops in a prison. Her three student prisoners tell her 33 stories, all about war, and she begins to write a historical novel. Her book tells of the friendship between Antonio Scopoli and Linnaeus, and of Scopoli's journey through war-ravaged Europe in the 18th century, to the place where the first banana was grown on European soil.
Following the dreamlike form of Boccaccio's The Decameron – with several short stories sitting within a framing narrative - Neverend investigates the inner logics of conflict, war and trauma. Based on the Yugoslav wars, it is an allegory of every war.

I looked up at the balcony of city hall where our flag waved in the light of the rising moon. The war wasn’t over yet. For us, the war continued. But not on battlefields, in trenches at the front, or in various military ambushes, but here, in the screaming solitude of a dead city.

In June 2022 Neverend was number one on the prestigious German SWR Bestenliste, a monthly list of new literary releases that is compiled by 30 literary critics:
A book set in the European future, but in which the war is present as a memory echo. (...) Thus real and surreal layers overlap, the writing is pictorially strong and linguistically elaborate.

International Spycher Prize for Literature 2022

What is narrated is wrested from silence, overlaid with a subtle thrum that proclaims the doom of the world. In this book, Šteger succeeds in giving despair and incomprehension a literary form that gets under the skin.

Süddeutsche Zeitung
Neverend is a book with clouded horizons all around. It combines slivers of reality with the fantastic, the grotesque, and gritty satire.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Aleš Šteger takes us to a still fresh pit of murder in Europe: a family escapes their burning village in Bosnia and then manages to flee the burning asylum seekers’ home. /.../ Reading about this now, as Russian soldiers march through Ukraine and mass graves are opened again, creates a great sense of trepidation.

Berliner Zeitung
The novel’s unique baroque lightness is also imbued with bitterness, even a dark foreboding of the deepest human impulses and a feeling of helplessness. Neverend detects the boundaries of personal freedom. Prison is, in the post-Foucault sense, an ideal starting point for posing questions such as: how far does freedom go, how much freedom do we still have with invisible restrictions, how does the idea of confinement spread beyond restrictively closed environments. An intriguingly written dystopia, for which it would be difficult to find a comparable work in Slovenian literature.

Delo

Also by Aleš Šteger

Gods Are Laughing at Us

Bogovi se nam smejijo

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