Minuet for Guitar

Translated by Harry Leeming

Collection Slovenian Literature Series

Ranking with the best novels about World War II, Minuet for Guitar is also a masterpiece of Slovenian fiction. Taking cues from the wartime epics of Ford Madox Ford and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Zupan tells the harrowing story of partisan soldier "Berk" and his surreal experiences as a guerilla during the Axis occupation of Ljubljana. Running parallel to the jumble of Berk's wartime experiences is his no less peculiar encounter with an old enemy during a vacation at a Spanish coastal resort. Together, the two men try to make sense of their wartime memories, leading past and future into a danse macabre undermining the certainties of each. A document of the horrors and tiny comedies of war, and an exploration of the nature of beauty and morality when subjected to the absurdity of history, Minuet for Guitar is an overwhelming literary achievement.

Details

Title Minuet for Guitar

Author Vitomil Zupan

Translated by Harry Leeming

Collection Slovenian Literature Series

Title First Published 01 December 2011

Format Hardcover

Nb of pages 390 p.

ISBN-10 1-56478-689-7

ISBN-13 978-1-56478-689-0

GTIN13 (EAN13) 9781564786890

Nb of pages 390

Dimensions 5.5 x 8 in.

List Price $23.95

Onix Version 2.1

Excerpt

Must Make the Top

This phrase recurs like a motto in the mass of papers lying here in front of me, handwritten in inks and pencils of various colors.
The compilation is based on daily notes that run for a few pages, then peter out to reemerge later in a plethora of minute details, odd words, sketches of a story line, all recovered from a soldier's green canvas rucksack; dog-eared exercise books, leaflets, bits of cardboard, scraps of paper covered with an untidy scrawl, There had been a purpose in all this. The material was not particularly legible. Some names had been abbreviated to their initial letters while certain other personal and geographical names had been copied out in full, at the writer’s whim. Initial "A" could stand for Albin or Anton and several other names and nicknames. “G” could stand for Goriče or Grosuplje or some other place. The reader had to decide for himself. The writer’s own name occurred on most pages: Jakob Bergant, sometimes written Jakob Bergant-Berk.
...more

In an eyewitness account of the fighting at Jelenov Žleb, by one who took part, we find: “Charge! make for the top!” cried the partisan commander. “À la montagna!” yelled the officer commanding the Italian Macerata Brigade. There was only a matter of five or ten yards in it but it was a partisan machine gun that first opened fire from the top. A description of this victory follows, together with the note: MUST MAKE THE TOP.
At one point we read how Bergant, perched high up in the fork of a tree, watches German tanks on the road below, rumbling by with open turrets. In one stands the tank commander. Sensing the hidden partisan’s gaze fixed on the nape of his neck, he turns and begins to look up into the trees. To break the unwelcome link, the partisan repeats to himself that isolated phrase: must make the top. The German drives on.
Somewhere near the end, there is a note written in a careful hand: “the road matters, not the goal; the goal alters like the setting sun.”
There are several selected sayings, quotations, maxims, entered in the notes, sometimes for no apparent reason, and sometimes as an integral part of them. I could hardly include in this book even a quarter of the accumulated hodgepodge. For example, a good half of one exercise book contains thoughts on the relations between subjects and authority, brought to a close by a quotation from Machiavelli’s “the Prince”: “I consider a man happy whose conduct is adapted to the spirit of the age, and unhappy when at odds with it.”
The notes were obviously made at different times and later bound together. The ink is faded, for example, where we read: “The night we call cherry blossom night. A tree—stars like the petals of the white blossom, shooting stars. Over Suha Krajina. A minuet. Dogs barking, a mule braying, strict silence, the stones in the wood.” There are at least twenty papers appended to this page, describing many details, characters, events, and these probably belong to the time both preceding and following that night. The paper is whiter, the writing more even.
“A spoon stuck in a puddle of congealed blood. The battle at S.” And a bundle of new pages. There arc many such examples.
A nostalgia for human society and a passionate yearning for lasting solitude rub, shoulders on the road from V. to R. G.
Empty offices. Memoirs of a clerk who loved his documents.
Eighty fascists. Blood flowing down the hillside. Shirts that don’t fit.
A massive hulk, idly rolling in an oily fluid; cold, cruel, dim, devoid of feeling, awash in the foaming surge. Might and a faint glimmer through the clouds.
A sack of hand grenades instead of a pillow for your head.
Short notes like these are followed by additions and afterthoughts but through it all runs one thread, one road. The diarist tried to keep to his line and the copyist has tried to do the same. It goes without saying that he also drew on the fruit of his own experience. His chief aim was continuity; to engage the reader’s interest was his least concern.

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