Slovenian Literature
4 total works
I Saw Her That Night, a love story in time of war, is a novel about a few years in the life and mysterious disappearance of Veronika Zarnik, a young bourgeois woman from Ljubljana, sucked into the whirlwind of a turbulent period in history. We follow her story from the perspective of five different characters, who also talk about themselves, as well as the troubled Slovenian times before and during World War II; times that swallowed, like a Moloch, not only the people of various beliefs involved in historical events, but also those who lived on the fringes of tumultuous events, which they did not even fully comprehend—they only wanted to live. But “only” to live was an illusion: it was a time when, even under the seemingly safe and idyllic shelter of a manor house in Slovenia, it was impossible to avoid the rushing train of violence.
The three characters at the heart of the novel, Valentin, a partisan resistance fighter, his girlfriend Sonja, and the SS officer Ludwig, once called Ludek, each try in their own way to defend their love from the senselessness of evil and the downfall of human dignity. The war upsets their perception of the world and of themselves and inevitably breaks their lives.
And Love Itself, the title taken from Lord Byron’s poem, is an astonishing tale of will and resilience of the human spirit against the backdrop of historical coincidences and tragedy. Jančar poses complex questions and exposes essential dilemmas faced by modern man in an expansive style that is interspersed with extraordinary lyrical interludes.