Lojze Kovačič wrote in short prose and longer forms, including non-fiction and, primarily, fiction. For him, the novel form is based on fragments, as in his Five Fragments or Dust, but is expanded into a trilogy in The Newcomers. He is bound to the heritage of the modernist tradition, to Joyce, Proust, Kafka, and Woolf.
Slovenian literary historians agree that with his novel A Boy and Death—despite its debts to Existentialism—Lojze Kovačič had decisively transposed Slovenian fiction into the sphere of modernism. He is claimed as one of the major Slovenian prose writers of the last sixty years; and his novel The Newcomers is considered the most important Slovenian novel of the twentieth century.
