Dušan Šarotar
Panorama. Narration on the unfolding of events
Keller, 284 pages, 17 euros
Italians seem to ignore everything about a neighboring (and beautiful) country like Slovenia and its capital Ljubljana, between Gorizia and Vienna. It is from there that a true writer comes, who gives us the pleasure of a demanding and intelligent reading that deliberately refers to certain masters of the second post-war period, in particular Danilo Kiš and WG Sebald, two great and sorrowful and close heirs of the Kafka and Joyce .
Like Kiš, Šarotar has strong roots which, however, do not hinder him in the search for his own path of knowledge and reflection, and for autonomous ways of narration. His journey starts from Ireland and from a Europe that still has the disasters of war present and meets the results of new wars and violence towards the Adriatic. New people and new places that the author documents (like Sebald) with the help of photographs, evocative in their warm immediacy and which seem to attest to what the author sees as well as what the author thinks. And the many encounters with people whose roots have been lost or confused, between exiles and defeats, with the uncertain migrants of singular and mass odyssey, refer to a today of difficult survival and without collective enthusiasm, where wandering is memory and research of how it is still possible to give meaning to one’s own experience, to the common stories touched by the great history, which is still an enemy.
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