In My Father’s Books, the first volume in Luan Starova’s multivolume Balkan Saga, he explores themes of history, displacement, and identity under three turbulent regimes—Ottoman, Fascist, and Stalinist—in the twentieth century. Weaving a story from the threads of his parents’ lives from 1926 to 1976, he offers a child’s-eye view of personal relationships in shifting political landscapes and an elegiac reminder of the enduring power of books to sustain a literate culture.    Through lyrical waves of memory, Starova reveals his family’s overlapping religious, linguistic, national, and cultural histories. His father left Constantinople as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, and the young family fled from Albania to Yugoslav Macedonia when Luan was a boy. His parents, cosmopolitan and well-traveled in their youth, and steeped in the cultures of both Orient and Occident, find themselves raising their children in yet another stagnant and repressive state. Against this backdrop, Starova remembers the protected spaces of his childhood—his mother’s walled garden, his father’s library, the cupboard holding the rarest and most precious of his father’s books. Preserving a lost heritage, these books also open up a world that seems wide, deep, and boundless.

My Father’s Books

Biographies & Memoirs

Starova, Luan

Historical

University of Wisconsin Press

It’s the late 1940s in Skopje, Yugoslavia, in the critical year leading to Tito’s break with Stalin. Pushed to leave mountain villages to become the new proletariat in urban factories, a flood of peasants crowds into Skopje—and with them, all of their goats. Suffering from hunger, Skopje’s citizens welcome the newcomers. But municipal leaders are faced with a dilemma when the central government issues an order calling for the slaughter of the country’s goat population. With food so scarce, will they hide the outlawed animals? Or will they comply with the edict and endure the bite of hunger?    The Time of the Goats is the second novel in Luan Starova’s acclaimed multivolume Balkan saga. It follows the main characters from My Father’s Books and the tragicomic events of their lives in Skopje as the narrator’s intellectual father and the head goatherd become friends. As local officials clumsily carry out absurd policies, Starova conveys the bonds of understanding and mutual support that form in Skopje’s poorest neighborhoods. At once historical and allegorical, folkloric and fantastic, The Time of the Goats draws lyrically on Starova’s own childhood.

The Time of the Goats

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Based on a seemingly trivial event in recent Balkan history, this fable about the history and spirit of the Balkans highlights the dangers of ideologies and the stoicism with which the region's people have always endured tyranny. The novel's narrator is the son of exiled Albanians and he sets out to catalog his father's library. When he discovers a collection of books related to goats, he remembers the events he witnessed during his childhood shortly after his family settled in Macedonia. During that time, just after the end of World War II, the new government worked tirelessly to create a great proletariat in a country that had until then been mostly rural. Shepherds were forced to move to the cities, and soon these were invaded by the goats that the shepherds refused to abandon. When the government ordered the extermination of the goats, they did not foresee the problems it would cause in the daily lives of the citizens. Basada en un episodio aparentemente trivial de la reciente historia balcánica, esta fábula sobre la historia y el espíritu de los Balcanes resalta el peligro de las ideologías y el estoicismo con que el pueblo de la región ha soportado siempre las tiranías. El narrador de la novela es hijo de exiliados albaneses y se dispone a catalogar la biblioteca de su padre. Al descubrir en ella una colección de libros relacionados con las cabras, evoca los acontecimientos que presenció durante su niñez poco después de que su familia se instalara en Macedonia. En aquella época, justo al terminar la Segunda Guerra Mundial, el nuevo régimen trabajaba con ahínco para crear una gran clase proletaria en un país hasta entonces rural. Los pastores fueron obligados a instalarse en las ciudades y pronto éstas fueron invadidas por las cabras que los pastores se negaron a abandonar. Cuando las autoridades decretaron el exterminio de las cabras no se dieron cuenta de los problemas que causarían en la vida cotidiana de los ciudadanos.

El tiempo de las cabras (Spanish Edition)

Libros del Asteroide

Vremeto na kozite (Macedonian Edition)

Misla

Balkanski kluč (Macedonian Edition)

Presadena zemja (Edicija "Sovremena Makedonska proza") (Macedonian Edition)

Ǵurǵa

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