The respected and renowned Maribor writer Tone Partljič returns after Ljude z Otoka (Beletrina, 2021) with the historical novel Veter z vzhoda, in which he continues his testimony about his birthplace on the Drava River. This time, he ventures into the 1930s, a tense historical period marked, among other things, by the awakening of the labor movement, the death of Rudolf Maister and the assassination of King Alexander in Marseilles and Chancellor Dollfus in Vienna. The novel, which is a noble mix of fiction and reality, presents a host of historical figures, and at the center of the story are students who slowly gain a broader view of the world they live in, while naturally getting involved in more or less fatal problems. But past all this, the Drava flows calmly and steadily, undistracted... Tone Partljič said upon the release of his new novel: "Although I am 'only' eighty years old, I feel when I cross the bridge that the entire Drava, which has flowed through our city towards the east for thousands of years, is within me, that I am surrounded by a thousand and more years of our Maribor... Sometimes a glow can be seen in the north, and from the west there is always a breeze blowing 'down the Drava'; up the Drava, the wind very rarely blows from the east. After the First World War, it sometimes blew when the 'communists' heard the echoes of the revolution in distant Russia, when a crowd of students from Prlekija and Slovenske gorice caused unrest and excitement in the gymnasiums and the city, when the Primorska people brought a breath of the Karst bora, when nationalist tensions were already flashing in Europe; and in Maribor they have already heard the echoes of thunder... I chose the year 1934 for the story, when General Maister was buried in the city, Dollfus was killed in Vienna, and King Alexander in Marseille. But even in a novel you cannot write about bygone times and winds without heroes who have names; So, you can't write about Maister's widow, the old German lady who stayed in Maribor after 1918, without workers in textile factories and the railway colony, without young boys and girls, fathers and mothers, people from Primorska who didn't like pumpkin seed oil, without professors, judges and police officers... I 'packed' their obligations, worries, tears, audacity, mistakes and visions into these few hundred pages, so that they might interest us even today, attract tears and a smile, warn us when we hear distant thunder and inform us about small and large deaths, as well as about the beautiful songs of rattlesnakes, the leaves on the branches that turn so beautifully in autumn, about the Drava and time that flows and says nothing. "But I tried to say something about that time and the people who cried, loved, hated, feared, politicized, and died like us today." Partljič once again masterfully depicts the fates of ordinary people caught in the grip of the wheels of history and reveals another face of Maribor that we have only known from textbooks or testimonies. Unforgettable!
