My Father's Dreams - Softcover

Flisar, Evan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908236221 ISBN 13: 9781908236227

Publisher: Istros Books, 2015

Synopsis

My Father's Dreams is a controversial and shocking novel by Slovenia's bestselling author Evald Flisar, and is regarded by many critics as his best. The book tells the story of fourteen-year-old Adam, the only son of a village doctor and his quiet wife, living in apparent rural harmony. But this is a topsy-turvy world of illusions and hopes, in which the author plays with the function of dreaming and story-telling to present the reader with an eccentric 'bildungsroman' in reverse. Spiced with unusual and original overtones of the grotesque, the history of an insidious deception is revealed, in which the unsuspecting son and his mother will be the apparent victims; and yet who can tell whether the gruesome end is reality or just another dream. This is a novel that can be read as an off-beat crime story, a psychological horror tale, a dream-like morality fable, or as a dark and ironic account of one man's belief that his personality and his actions are two different things. My Father's Dreams can also be read as a story about a boy who has been robbed of his childhood in the cruelest way.

About this title

From the Publisher

Although Evald Flisar is well known in Slovenia for the best-selling novels that describe travels of hallucinatory intensity into new and newly-unfamiliar territories, I suspect the real audience for his fiction lies in the U.S., where the grotesque is an essential element of almost all narratives, whether tragi-comic, or simply tragic or comic. Flisar manages to excite a frisson of horror, accompanied by the titillating self-consciousness of a masterfully orchestrated spectacle. It is the purported truth of the narrative – presented as memoir or autobiography – that tears away any cushioning protective layer of artifice. As one reads Flisar, one becomes aware that any surrealism in the narrative is a far cry from such distant relatives as South American magical realism. South American magical realism tends to lose its bite as soon as one realizes the political allegory that creates its primary intellectual scaffolding. My Father’s Dreams violates the psyche precisely as the characters are violated. It is via one’s own trust and through the aggressive defense of one’s own innocence (or ignorance) that the violation occurs ... What we see in Flisar’s My Father’s Dreams is precisely what Edmund Burke defined as the sublime.

From the Author

And in the words of the author ...

The author is fond of Paul Auster's line, "The question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell..." The story, any story, should not be so much understood as absorbed and deeply felt ... Reading should be a sensual experience, not impeded by over-reasoning and approving or disapproving arguments ... Nevertheless, the author is highly amused by having his stories explained ... He believes that writing is a primary act of creation which is not a matter of negotiation with literary trends or theories, readers' taste or the prevailing rules of fiction ... If we assume that the character of Abortus is the unborn half of ourselves, to which, in the hope of creating a semblance of unity, we read our "dream diaries" (perceptions of reality), the novel cannot avoid performing a similar function: it is a conversation with the aborted half of one's human potential, a desire for making oneself whole.

About this edition

• Publisher: Istros Books
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1908236221
• ISBN 13: 9781908236227
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 196