IVANA IN FRONT OF THE SEA << Back

The narrator returns from Paris, where she has created a home for herself, to the Primorje region in Slovenia in order to clear the apartment that belonged to her late mother for a serious buyer, and in a heap of yellowed photographs she finds a picture of her grandmother, holding her five-year old mother’s hand, whilst her other hand lies on her pregnant stomach. The year it was taken, 1943, was one of the troubling events and rapid change. What happened to the unborn child? Through a number of parallel stories taking place at different times and generations of one family, Veronika Simoniti’s novel presents the reader with the collective past and individual fates. These move between Paris and Primorska, also stopping in Gorenjska, Ljubljana, and many other places, even in Serbia as refugees, but all this movement cannot break the human bonds. Even the hard times after the war are written about in the author’s gentle manner, looking from ever new standpoints at what we share. A beautiful novel about unattractive times and things.