Marjan Rožanc (1930-1990) wrote his Novel of Books (1983) as an explicitly autobiographical, i. e., nonfictional narrative, highly emotional and autoreflective, but strictly organized as a series of interactions between the author's/narrator's real-life and reading experiences. Merging the genre of novel with other genres, such as autobiography and essay, and permeating it with a variety of references, allusions and quotations are typical of the contemporary postmodern novel. The contrast between the author's/narrator's oppressive life and ecstatic spiritual freedom obtained by reading fiction and philosophy is presented with literary skill, but also as a valuable document, as all the books mentioned and discussed in the Novel are real. They were accessible to every Slovenian reader of the time and they attest to the fact that in Slovenia, in the decades of 1940-1980, there was an abundance of original and translated, classical and modern literature.
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