Drago Jančar: Drevo brez imena

The Tree with No Name

Drevo brez imena

Drago Jančar

Genre:: Novel
Year of publication:: 2008
Number of pages:: 285
Rights sold:: Albania (Toena), Austria (Folio), Croatia (Meandar Media), Czech Republic (Altenberg), France (Phébus), Hungary (L’Harmattan), Ukraine (Folio), USA (Dalkey Archive Press)
Available reading materials:: English pdf, French pdf, German pdf

In early 2000, archivist Janez Lipnik receives a folder sent to him by Slovenian émigrés in Australia. The folder contains a diary detailing the numerous sexual conquests of an unnamed Slovenian man, starting in Europe in the 1940s and continuing into his old age. Despite Lipnik’s disdain (and palpable envy) at the extent of the writer’s activity, he becomes fascinated by an affair the man had in wartime Slovenia with a teacher called Zala. As he becomes increasingly obsessed with uncovering the truth of the affair, Lipnik’s own marriage starts to deteriorate. His reluctance to address a suspicion about his wife’s life before their marriage contrasts with his tenacity in researching the story of the lover and Zala, and the possible relevance of a rusty bicycle retrieved from the silt. Lipnik’s timidity in personal matters seems to spur his persistence and Bartleby-like obduracy in the office.
Shifting between Slovenia’s post-communist present and its wartime occupation by the Axis powers, The Tree with No Name, is Drago Jančar’s masterpiece: a compelling and universally significant story of a man consumed by the past; a man who must confront the constraints set on truth by his – and every – culture.

Shortlisted for the Kresnik Award for best novel of the year 2009

Jančar, one of Slovenia’s foremost writers, skillfully infuses even the most mundane events with foreboding, dread and paranoia.

Publishers Weekly
A clutch of brusque, seriocomic and sometimes forbidding tales about lust, loss and betrayal... Taut storytelling...

Kirkus Review
A timely work, it is likely to become more and more relevant over the coming years.

Quarterly Conversation
As a novelist and a master of short prose, Jančar reveals deep human social and psychological traumas and — like his Central European literary and spiritual relatives, Franz Kafka, Günter Grass, or Milan Kundera — finds no escape from the unclear, primal, and evil human lot… A unique, ethically sensitive, and politically independent thinker.

Slavic and East European Journal

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