The Tree with No Name

Jancˇar (The Galley Slave) has written a strange and compelling tale. Janez Lipnik is an archivist in contemporary Slovenia who lives in the “year of our Lord 2000 on the edge of the city known as Ljubljana” with his increasingly dissatisfied wife, Marijana, who objects to his growing obsession with obscure WWII-era documents. Rather than spend his time assessing ownership and inheritance, Janez studies the anonymous diary of soldier, not a “conqueror and pervert” but rather a “Great Lover,” who has dutifully recorded all his passions and conquests—about 400 of them—rather than the war’s horrors. Janez compulsively reads and rereads the diary in his quest to understand how the “sex maniac” intersects with the fate of Zala D., a school teacher, and Ivanka K., an asylum nurse. Janez’s orderly domestic life begins to unravel when an old bicycle removed from the river at the center of Ljubljana triggers dark Walter Mitty-like reveries in which he finally meets in the present tense those who had been relegated to the past. This enthralling novel forces the reader to acknowledge, like Janez, that sometimes the calm of the present can not erase the chaos of the past. (Sept.)