Some books aim for comfort, for a style, plot and characters that will spirit the reader away to another world and release them, the last page turned, the brain not too strained, with the feeling of a story neatly told and concluded. Not so The Errors of Young Tjaž (1972; tr. from the Slovenian by Michael Biggins, 2013), Carinthian Slovenian author Florjan Lipuš’s 1972 novel, a strangely challenging, disconcerting but ultimately very gratifying read published last year by Dalkey Archive Press in its Slovenian Literature Series.
Why disconcerting? For one, there is the constant uncertainty as to who narrator and narrated-to are, “you,” “he,” and a number of “I” being the main, but not simultaneous, tellers of the always one-sided conversation that makes up the book. “You” and “he” are most often the same person: Tjaž, a rebellious, disaffected boarder from a rural family in post-war Austria. “I” is a fairly constant narrator, describing himself at times as a fellow boarder-turned-report writer, though “I” can also be a girl Tjaž was involved with, or, as “we,” the collective, unspecified voice of the church school where Tjaž boards for a time. They all speak about Tjaž, but Tjaž himself is always elusive, as when, in the early pages of the first chapter, he is at once on the train he has just boarded, and still in the village he has just left, where villagers brought together by his walking past them busy themselves discussing him.
Neither are these narrators faithful chroniclers of Tjaž’s life or even of the period of his boarding school life that they are concerned about. The main narrator, when deciding it is time for him to make an “I” appearance, justifies his story by recalling a report he has been commissioned to write on certain aspects of Tjaž’s life, particularly his expulsionfrom the boarding school, for his boss (who that is, or even whether the existence of this boss matters, is one of the many things for the reader to decide). He describes himself as “thoroughly reliable, trustworthy, reasonable,” and ponders over the relative importance for his report of “even superficially extraneous matters.” Yet for all his statements that his report will be “as factual and documentarily precise as possible,” this narrator often, and obviously, departs from this objective: here he talks at length about the colour of a spider’s back that only Tjaž should have seen, there he corrects himself, preferring to make the light he describes come through stained glass rather than curtains because it sounds more appropriate for the chapel setting.
Click here to read the entire review at the Mookse and Gripes
