Name: Mojstrovina
Price: 24 EUR
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9789612846206

The Masterpiece

Mojstrovina

Ana Schnabl

Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 2020
Number of pages:: 217
Rights sold:: Austria (Folio Verlag), Croatia (Neolit), Serbia (Partizanska knjiga), UK (Istros Books)
Available reading materials:: English pdf, German pdf

The golden 1980s in the Socialist Yugoslavia were a curious time, a time when the country had undoubtedly already begun its descent into disintegration, but when the bloody years that would follow seemed inconceivable. A remarkable time of unprecedented freedom of thought and travel, a time of dissident movements and heady music and lively literary scenes. But also a time when the state still had a tight grip on the lives of its citizens, not least through its security services and its web of informants.
It is 1985 and Adam, a professor of literature at Ljubljana University, decides to try his hand at writing again after almost twenty years. Ana is the editor that receives his manuscript, ‘The Masterpiece’. The protagonists’ professional relationship soon crosses boundaries and they become entangled in an intense, adulterous affair. But Adam moves in dissident circles and Ana owes her coveted position as the youngest editor in the history of the biggest state publishing house to her cooperation with the dark side of the government. The Masterpiece is as much a love story that rocks the lives of the two main characters as it is a political drama that changes the map of the world.

Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2023

More than halfway through, the reader is suddenly struck by the realization that the book occasionally reads like the richer parts of le Carré. Even old George Smiley himself would have been happy with Adam slowly betraying his long-held beliefs and comrades, observing his fellow dissidents as “undernourished narcissists” whose conflicts exhaust him. Yet Schnabl spices her spy-novel atmosphere with more existential questions, paraphrasing Nietzsche in Adam’s conviction that “fate is just a string of repetitions with miniscule differences, repetitions which, when first struck, should have destroyed us, but didn’t.”

The Los Angeles Review of Books
This novel works because Schnabl is really able to get into the psychology of the four protagonists – Ana, Adam, Vera and Sergij - while at the same time throwing in the complications of both the novel and Sofa and Vitomil. Sofia and Vitomil are superbly portrayed. They come across as a sweet old couple, even as we know they are both working for the secret police. They are shown as low-ranking and petty – they simply longed for revolutionaries that they could expose, but in the end had to make do with a small company of men who acted suspiciously only because they were trying to conceal their homosexuality from the world – yet clearly have considerable influence, getting Ana her job and able to threaten her if she does not follow the Party line. The book may be about the novel – Adam’s novel is also called Masterpiece – but ultimately it could be called Love in a Time of Political Repression.

The Modern Novel
It’s a rare occasion that Slovenian is used in such a vivid manner. It’s a rare occasion that a young (or any) author writing in Slovenian so thoroughly – emotionally, physically, reflexively and reflectively – grasps the time, space and spirit of a generation, while keeping their writing free of petit-bourgeois moral judgments, taboos, ideologies, fake aesthetics, clichés, redundancies and overcompensations that belong in high school, as the author is wont to say … Schnabl, a clever student of human nature and a relentless examiner of her environment and circumstances, (almost) never exaggerates.

Bukla
What sets Schnabl apart is her deliberate turn from cynicism. Thanks in part to its absence, the author’s dense writing never becomes oppressive, not even when at its most candid, and dispenses commentary on controlling social practices as if it were an afterthought.

Delo