My Father's Dreams

Praise for My Father's Dreams: A Tale of Innocence Abused "One of the most chilling characteristics of Flisar's new novel is the technique whereby the reader is allowed to know and see more than the first-person narrator: to see the story behind the story ... One is often tempted to warn the fourteen-year-old hero, 'Adam, don't believe your father, can't you see what he is doing?'... Descriptions are so visual that we often get the feeling we are watching a movie in which we are served a new twist before recovering from the previous one, while at the same time seeing, smelling, hearing and feeling every detail. The reader's enjoyment is almost voyeuristic, and the book is difficult to put down, unpredictable to the last page ... Reading it is like looking into a mirror in which, next to Adam, Eve, father and mother, we soon discover our own face..." - Metka Peserl, VECER (Literary Supplement) "... It is humor and occasional irony, even self-irony, mocking the traditional Slavonic seriousness, that is the hallmark of Flisar's style. Because over the years he has polished it to a high degree of mastery, stylistically My Father's Dreams probably surpasses even his legendary cult novel, The Sorcerer's Apprentice. We can feel this as much in the melody of his sentences as in the way he builds the demanding and complicated narrative structure, within which the real and the dream sequences are presented very convincingly, even in the case of the most unusual images ... It is this union of the individual and universal, speaking about the fate of one person yet surpassing his personal story, which thus becomes the reader's story, by which we recognize literature as the art of the words..." - Josip Osti, Review 2000 "Precisely and sharply, with an enviable economy of stylistic devices, Flisar presents the reader with a half-dreamlike world of fourteen-year-old Adam ... This topsy-turvy world of illusions and hopes, in which Flisar plays with the function of dreaming, is spiced with unusual and original grotesque overtones ... With masterful strokes, Flisar weaves the episodes of his story into an eccentric bildungsroman-in-reverse, moves the action from one mental or emotional state to another, and resolves it with a dream vision ... My Father's Dreams is thus a fascinatingly multi-layered tale, which, with its many meanings, explores different themes and resolves them with unusual silences and telling digressions..." - Igor Brato, Delo (Literary Supplement) "Flisar's best work so far? It's not that the author's previous novels had not been persuasive and skillfully written, or that his imagery had not charmed and impressed the reader. But evidently it is possible to go even further and discover a narrative mechanism which works strictly within the framework of fiction and creates with fantastic effectiveness the synchronicity of ideas and images, thoughts and emotions ... The dream material is richly differentiated, the descriptions are luxuriously sensual, poetic, morbid, prophetic, archetypal, erotic, hellish, heavenly ... All the way to the moment of final reckoning, when everything turns cruelly real ... The exuberant imagery of Adam's dreams turns out to be the most reliable seismograph of reality. The dynamics of unconscious truthfulness, which Veyne ascribes to dream-forming, poetic and myth-creating energies, confers the advantage of telling important truths without paying any particular attention to them..." - Lucija Stepancic, Contemporary Review "Probably the most complicated dimension that will attract and even obsess the reader is Adam's dreams. They are presented as a field of the unconscious, a field of mysterious energies that can be neither controlled nor fully explored, and are supposed to be

EVALD FLISAR (1945, Slovenia). Novelist, playwright, essayist, editor, globe-trotter (travelled in more than 90 countries), underground train driver in Sydney, editor of (among other publications) an encyclopaedia of science and invention in London, author of short stories and radio plays for the BBC, president (1995 - 2002) of the Slovene Writers' Association, since 1998 editor of the oldest Slovenian literary journal Sodobnost (Contemporary Review). Author of eleven novels (eight nominated for kresnik, the Slovenian "Booker"), two collections of short stories, three travelogues (regarded as the best in Slovenian travel writing), two books for children (both nominated for awards) and fifteen stage plays (seven nominated for Best Play of the Year Award, three times won the award). Winner of the Preseren Foundation Prize, the highest state award for prose and drama, the prestigious upancic Award for lifetime achievement, three awards for Best Radio Play, etc. Various works translated into 33 languages, among them Bengali, Malay, Nepalese, Indonesian, Turkish, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, Czech, Albanian, Lithuanian, Icelandic, Russian, English, German, Italian, Spanish, etc. His stage plays are regularly performed all over the world, most recently in Austria, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina and Belarus. Attended more than 50 literary readings and festivals on all continents. Lived abroad for 20 years (three years in Australia, 17 years in London). Since 1990, resident in Ljubljana, Slovenia.