Early in Ciril Kosmač’s A Day in Spring, the Yugoslavian narrator attends a dinner to honor allied officers visiting Ljubljana right after World War II. A British general addresses the assembled partisans and inevitably quotes lines from Tennyson’s poem about the “Noble six hundred!” At that moment, the narrator reflects, “it occurred to me that our Brigade of the Dead numbers one million six hundred thousand.” An exclamation point would be superfluous.

This isn’t, however, a book occupied by recounting battles fought in two world wars. Kosmač begins and concludes his novel of reminiscence by calling out a season’s beauty, observing that it "was a lovely day in spring, full of light and sound, as if cast in pure silver.” During the pages in between, the loveliness of light and sound contends with stresses: personal rebellion, neighbors’ conflicts, and ache from losses of lovers and family members to war in a Slovenian countryside set amidst beautiful highlands not immune to military incursion.

The narrator’s reminiscences include diverse characters who can enlighten, entertain, and at moments even enchant. Despite the turbulence of the era, the tale often is given over to ordinary pleasures, or to finding an attitude of acceptance toward tragedy and common human foibles, so that life might go on for a community or a soul. ( )