Minuet for Guitar is an intense exploration of the horrors of war, of moral- ity 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 Ja- kob Bergant Berk, a man lost in two places and times. Slip-slidin...g 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, on 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 war- time 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 seductive voice.

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