Books
How to find that memory trail that will either lead us to the right answer of who we are, or help us overcome loss, or give meaning to our present.
Based on the words of publisher representative Mateja Novak, the essence of Leonora Flis’s fourteen stories in the collection Enakozvočja is perhaps best described by a sentence in the story “Tišina” (Silence): “Stuck in remembering, she slid through the moments of years in the bathtub, searching for a connection to the present.” The author—whose debut, Upogib časa (The Bending of Time), was published by LUD Literatura in 2015—has, as the text on the book’s cover points out, placed memories in the role of the central protagonists of Enakozvočja. These memories are “joyful, sad, vivid, all-pervading, or suppressed; more or less embellished, developed into stories, or fragmented and chipped, they give meaning to the lives of the characters, intertwine their present with their past, and domesticate the incomprehensibility of time and its passage. With an exceptional ear for painting details that bring her stories to life with smells, colors, and sounds, Leonora Flis subtly observes human connections and disconnections, and farewells. In doing so, she does not shy away from describing traumatic events.”
As a professor of literature, a writer, an American, and a friend of Leonora Flis, I read her book, Upogib časa (The Bending of Time), with great interest, as it describes my homeland and its culture. Lea got to know America and Americans through her frequent and prolonged visits to New York and occasional trips to other parts of the USA. She writes about her experiences with deep and informed insight, yet without sentimentality. Leonora feels and internalizes with an intuitive and profound sensitivity, and she sends this out to us—from the smell of freshly mowed grass in Central Park to the words of a jogger in Louisiana. When you read her words, you feel as though you’ve caught a stranger’s sudden gaze, yet in the same instant you realize that this stranger is yourself, it is you, the person reflected in a mirror you never knew was placed so close to you.
Elizabeth Stone, professor, writer, journalist
Discover the connection between the documentary novel and the simultaneous rise of (literary) journalism in the USA, during the turbulent sixties and the era of the nascent postmodern ethos.
Leonora Flis has accomplished much in her book’s eight dense chapters and four Appendixes. … Flis cleans up inconsistencies in terminology and its variations (from faction novel denoting a fusion of facts and fiction to historiographic metafiction to testimonio novel), and tightens up definitions and connections between her topic and New Journalism as she re-evaluates the development of a genre that has had its epicenter in the United States.
Heloiza Golbspan Herscovitz, California State University Long Beach, USA