Fiction
Menuet za kitaro/Minuet for Guitar
by Vitomil Zupan
Minuet for Guitar is an intense exploration of the horrors of war, of morality and of historical forces propelling men this way and that. Using his life experiences for much of the action in the novel, Zupan introduces us to Jakob Bergant Berk, a man lost in two places and times. Slip-sliding between occupied Slovenia in the 1940s and a Spanish resort in the 1970s, we move from harrowing wartime guerrilla fighting to Berk’s curious encounter with Joseph Bitter, a former German soldier, during vacation in Spain. In the war, Berk is an apolitical non-conformist swept along by events over which he has little control, and some thirty years later, still traumatised by his wartime experiences, he tries to make sense of his memories in discussions with his old enemy Bitter. Once rumoured that it was used by the CIA as a manual for guerrilla warfare, Minuet for Guitar is a powerful examination of war on par with Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, a modern Slovenian classic filled with philosophical ruminations and told in Zupan’s casual, ironic and even seductive voice.
