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FOUND IN TRANSLATION
Found in Translation
Talisman House: Passion
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Passion
Brane Mozetic
Translated from the Slovenian by Tamara Soban
Talisman House 2005
Reviewed by Travis Jeppesen
A feisty collection of nasty little tales, Passion is pure Mozetic. Although he's known primarily as a poet in the Anglophone literary world, the release - or should I say, unleashing - of this wild, gleefully demented book announces Mozetic's status as one of the supreme queer auto-fictionalists on the global scene.
If you haven't heard of Brane Mozetic, then it's time to wake up - and this book will be quite a rude awakening. Throughout the last two decades, Mozetic has emerged as one of the most controversial public figures in Slovenia, nearly single-handedly launching the gay rights movement that has spread like a wildfire across the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. All while pursuing an art that dares to explore the darkest aspects of queer life in the urban milieu, a personal and confrontational ars poetica fraught with pain, compassion, desire and delirium.
In Passion, Mozetic nosedives into the banal only to discover the violence lingering just below the surface - a violence he then fearlessly explodes, shards of truth flying everywhere. In spite of its visceral evocations, however, Passion's most shocking accomplishment is its emotional honesty.
Savagely funny, depraved in its excesses, Passion is the portrait of a loony bin seldom explored in literature; it's called real life.
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