600 DEVILS

Marjan recounts a colorful life as a cannabis smuggler while philosophizing about the meaning of existence.

The author, who’s the son of Slovenian refugees, offers what he characterizes as a confessional work (“a soul cleansing testimony with a smidgen of self-imposed community service”). He begins his narrative with his own birth in 1949 in Austria before backtracking to his family’s life as refugees during and after World War II. After the war, his parents and Uncle Aloyz lost their family farm when they wouldn’t accept a new communist regime facilitated by the Allies’ victory. Shortly after the author was born, they left the refugee camp and immigrated to Wisconsin. Marjan weaves his narrative back and forth between different points in his and his family’s lives, which makes for occasional confusion due to a lack of transitional cues. Little time is spent on the author’s childhood; it’s mostly used as a segue into his familial origins, as told to him by Uncle Aloyz. Marjan’s long criminal career began in his teens in the 1960s, smuggling cannabis from Mexico; he recalls his time working for a major supplier named Mario. (Some names, the author says, have been changed in his remembrance.) Most of Marjan’s personal narrative is told from memory or summarizes stories he was told by others; there are some citations, as well, although most are sourced from Wikipedia. Marjan offers complex imagery at times, but his major strength is his provocative philosophizing, particularly when he pulls from religious works for his worldview: “The Bible states that drinking causes dissipation. In the Vedas, alcohol is one of the four main pillars of a sinful life, leading to disease and the mode of ignorance. Taking a couple hits from a joint I scored from a hippie at the pool, I swam a few laps.” Readers looking for a heady and repentant crime narrative are sure to find it here.

A detailed family saga wrapped up in a thoughtful and sometimes-shocking personal narrative.