Faceless Men & Other Macedonian StoriesPerhaps villagers were the best natural critics of life under Communism in eastern Europe. Theirs is a perspective at once ironic, satiric and filled with stoicism. In these stories from Macedonia, Meto Jovanovski writes wittily against urban authorities, whose agents are everywhere and nowhere, and who conduct absurd 'modernizing' campaigns such as shooting all the dogs in the village. He writes tellingly of the indignities of queues, telephones, air travel and military conscription. And like John Berger, he persuades us that it is often the villager who is most in touch with the deepest realities of life. In 'Flight to Eternity', for example, it seems entirely natural that a man should gently make love to his dying wife: a powerful scene of the sort hard to find in the brutal and 'sophisticated' sexuality of modern literature. |
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Page ix
... Macedonia , the modern history of literary Macedonian is a rather brief one . Despite efforts in the late nineteenth century by Grigor Prlicev and the Miladinov brothers to establish a literary language , only after the Second World War ...
... Macedonia , the modern history of literary Macedonian is a rather brief one . Despite efforts in the late nineteenth century by Grigor Prlicev and the Miladinov brothers to establish a literary language , only after the Second World War ...
Page x
... Macedonia , Yugoslavia , Meto Jovanovski grew up in the impoverished mountain village of Braychino before attending the High Pedagogical Academy in Skopje , where he took a degree in Yugoslavian literatures and in Macedonian language ...
... Macedonia , Yugoslavia , Meto Jovanovski grew up in the impoverished mountain village of Braychino before attending the High Pedagogical Academy in Skopje , where he took a degree in Yugoslavian literatures and in Macedonian language ...
Page 68
... language they talk is no language at all ; I couldn't understand a word , as if they are not my children , too . I'd ask them something and they only laugh as though they thought , God save us ! I kept being imprisoned at home there as ...
... language they talk is no language at all ; I couldn't understand a word , as if they are not my children , too . I'd ask them something and they only laugh as though they thought , God save us ! I kept being imprisoned at home there as ...
Contents
The Man in the Blue Suit | 1 |
Event | 7 |
The President of the Central Committee | 24 |
Copyright | |
6 other sections not shown
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