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LITERATURE

that he himself will be the main charac- to be a bit dull. He represents himself as
ter and narrator in the novel. In this re- less intelligent, less powerful, more stu-
gard, he starts the novel as a novel of the pid than he really is. He represent things
novel, with a rich autobiographic layer from the so called “frog perspective”. He
and with a literary situation which deals uncovers the important moments in the
with the success of the previous novel, story and he sets the key intellectual,
The Time of Goats, with its literary glory ethical, political dilemmas usually in in-
and with the literary and political biogra- terrogative form or without his explicit
phy of the author. The author retells or comment leaving the reader to find the
indicates a series of quotations about the connection between things and to make
reception of his book, he conveys the as- the judgments placed by author, so we
sessments of its values and semantic lay- would say that he skillfully suggests them.
ers, about its reflection in France, the in-
ternational readership, the treatment to Hence, the main character, the author,
the other literary works, the literary and is slightly surprised of the reception of
spiritual traditions (of the “animal tradi- his work and his literary glory. Usually
tion”, of the “goat tradition”) which the
novel supplements. The writer is standing
straight before the great poetic, however
also intellectual dilemma – which is not
only how to write a new quality work, but
also how to approach the modern socio-
political situation, how to express the dif-
ficulties and dilemmas of time. If he man-
aged to vividly represent the character of
a past time, with metaphors that reach
the universal (which was a time when the
Law on Goat Breeding and their extermi-
nation in Macedonia was adopted), now it
seems as if he is writing about something
that is actually happening to us. Due to
the lack of historical distance, this is a
devilishly difficult task.

The incorporation of this writing,
intellectual and poetic layer is a great
challenge. It can make the novel quite
unreadable for the wider audience. This
has happened to many modern and post-
modern writers, both in Macedonia and
the world, whose works are susceptible
only to a narrow specialist elite. How-
ever, Luan Starova successfully avoids
this trap. Although this initial part of the
novel, due to its essayistic, self-poetic ap-
proach is the least susceptible to reading,
it slows down the story and it postpones
the empathy with functionality, with the
story and with the characters. However,
this is only a nuance because Luan Staro-
va uses elements of an old literary genre
which provides reception. It is a matter
of the old Roman genre “sotie”, where
the main character, the writer, pretends

102 September 2016