A diary recounting four decades' worth of sexual exploits, the memoir of a mental institution attendant, and a familiar-looking bicycle dredged out of a river--the discovery of these artifacts sends an archivist on an obsessive quest to discover their owners' identities and fates. Shifting between Slovenia's postcommunist present and its wartime occupation by the Axis, "The Tree with No Name" might well be Drago Jancar's masterpiece: a compelling and universally significant story of an individual confronting the constraints on truth set by his--and every--culture.
"Jancar, one of Slovenia's foremost writers, skillfully infuses even the most mundane events with foreboding, dread and paranoia." -- Publishers Weekly
"As a novelist and a master of short prose, Jancar reveals deep human social and psychological traumas and -- like his Central European literary and spiritual relatives, Franz Kafka, G?nter Grass, or Milan Kundera -- finds no escape from the unclear, primal, and evil human lot... A unique, ethically sensitive, and politically independent thinker." -- Slavic and East European Journal