Sea at Eclipse
Published on 21. February 2019
260 pages
978-961-6995-53-5 (ISBN)
Description
Mate Dolenc's novel Morje v casu mrka (Sea at Eclipse) is one of the most beautiful islands in the author's literary archipelago. In this work, Dolenc succeeds in summoning to the page all of his acquaintances, friends, fictional and actual heroes as well as their creators, so that they may listen together and refresh an age-old tale that people never grow tired of: a story about love and the search for it, a story about the sea. The Adriatic Sea has played a crucial role in Dolenc's personal and creative life. His endless fascination with this vast body of salt water appears in his literary works for both younger audiences and mature readers, and even in his academic publications. Sea at Eclipse is an intimate story about Val Sebald, an aging intellectual who became a fisherman many years ago, leaving behind the mainland and its shallow civilization. It tells of his life on an island, and the life he leads through the books that he brought with him to the island. It also delves into a long lost love and a new one, unattainable because of an age difference, and yet what leaves the greatest impression is his last battle with the "big fish." Ultimately he catches the fish, but fails to bring it to shore.
Sea at Eclipse deals with themes of old age and death and is considered by many to be Dolenc's best novel. Despite clear references to The Old Man and the Sea, Dolenc makes significant changes to Hemingway's fable by placing it under the surface of the sea, by introducing erotic elements, and by using humor as the key feature of his writing. The novel has been translated into Croatian, Czech, and English. In 2008, Jure Pervanje directed a film version of Sea at Eclipse.
Sea at Eclipse deals with themes of old age and death and is considered by many to be Dolenc's best novel. Despite clear references to The Old Man and the Sea, Dolenc makes significant changes to Hemingway's fable by placing it under the surface of the sea, by introducing erotic elements, and by using humor as the key feature of his writing. The novel has been translated into Croatian, Czech, and English. In 2008, Jure Pervanje directed a film version of Sea at Eclipse.
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Born in 1953 in Ljubljana, Mate Dolenc studied Comparative Literature and worked for the journal Mladina. After falling in love with the islands around Vis (in Croatia), he started to dedicate his time to scuba diving, while also writing literature (for youth and adults) and translating.
Already from the very outset of his career, Mate Dolenc rejected the mainstream in the Slovenian prose of the 1960s. Instead, he chose to deal with the individual urban experience and gradually introduced archetypal and mythico-symbolic dimensions into his novels. In the 1990s, his prose fiction dealt with the sea as a geographic and archetypal space where the individual experience of reality is permeated by imaginary elements such as dreams and myths. Although he sometimes plays with narrative strategies of magic realism and postmodernism, he does so with the firm conviction that life and books are one.
The motifs and themes that appear in Dolenc's literature for adults find their way also into his prose for children and youth (the Undine myth, the story about Jonah and the whale, the story about the painter that sailed off into his painting, the story about the love of the Sea-Bear). The persistence of the mythical and archetypal dimension of Dolenc's writing shows his deep, but never explicit, authorial intuition about what prevents us from losing our soul in the age of global capitalism. In fact, it is only by exploring the depths of our mind and our (collective) unconscious that we and our society can survive. From this point of view, the symbol of the Sea in Dolenc's later work seems more than pertinent.
In 1995 Dolenc received the PreSeren Fund Prize for his novel Pes z Atlantide (Dog from Atlantis, 1993) and the collection of short stories Rum in Sah (Rum and Chess, 1993). Twice he received formal awards for his youth literature: in 1986 the largest Slovenian publishing house, Mladinska knjiga, honoured him with the Levstik Award, and in 2004 he became the first author to win the annual Desetnica Award in recognition of the best work for children and youth.
Dolenc's prose work has also inspired film-makers, such as Vinci Vogue Anzlovar (The Vampire from Gorjanci, 2008) and Jurij Pervanje (The Sea at Eclipse, 2008).
