Acclaimed writer and critic Muharem Bazdulj has reviewed the Serbian translation of Dejan Trajkoski’s novel Infidelity, forthcoming with Dalkey Archive Press.
The review was posted in the daily newspaper Politika Daily. An English translation is provided below.
In an archetypal type of story as told by Trajkoski, an educated reader can easily get entangled in a sea of literary associations, but the impression is still dominated by the beauty of the poetic language and by the halo of ancient myths and legends.
REVIEW
Yugoslavia indeed broke away more than a quarter of decade ago, but the Serbian readers still have better knowledge about the Slovenian and Macedonian literature, than the, let say, Bulgarian or Greek. Some of the reasons for that are the common history and cultural space, as well as the retention of the personal contacts. The Slovenian and Macedonian languages do not have many speakers, but their literature is impressively rich and diverse.
As soon as a Serbian reader gives a read to the short novel of Dejan Trajkoski (1977) called Infidelity (Agora, Zrenjanin, 2018; translated by Urosh Pajic), he or she will have a very difficult time finding a matching equivalent in the Serbian literature. Trajkoski writes in a free and zizzy manner, making no market calculations. The result? One of those novels that are fast to read but leave a very lasting impression on the sensibility of the reader.
In short, Infidelity is a love story happening in the second decade of the twentieth century. In an interview, when asked why choosing that specific time period for the novel, the author says that the reasons are primarily linguistic in nature, no matter how odd that might sound: “The challenge for me in this novel was insertion of poetry into prose and use of folklore in the language, making that decade the best one in Macedonia for doing so. After that, all other pieces fitted very nicely with each other”.
Indeed, Trajkoski narrates an archetypal story of a great love, including in the title – Infidelity – which is the keyword of the novel, not only in a banal connotation of having an affair, but even more in a sense of giving up one’s ideals.
It is a type of story that could be told almost independently of the time period and the environment, but the choice made by the author is a precious one because it makes it possible for him to frame the story, in a style sense, in original and praising manner. Since we are talking about a translation here, it is important to mention that Urosh Pajic managed to translate exceptionally well the poetic tone of the author into Serbian language.
Here is a small excerpt from this novel:
“Some years later a big drought happened. It was a summer like no other, when even the ants forgot how a dew looked like. Not a single drop of moisture was to be seen hanging from the tips of the grass-blades so the ants might quench their thirst. The wretched drought devastated everything, making even the trees and the fields wretched, making them droop, leaving them bent halfway to the ground, like orphans; and the people were saying: ‘Even the sky has it in for us, dammit. It doesn’t feel like pissing down on us, to give us at least some soaking, damn… to give us some life.’”
The lovers who are in the centre of the plot are called Sone and Mena, invoking associations of the Sun and the Moon, followed by José Saramago. The story is dominantly brought in alternating narratives between the narrator and those told by Sone, creating an additional dynamism. However, they are not the only narrators, but this is no place for revealing everything. Although set in the relatively recent past, at least in historical sense, Infidelity is a novel emanating the spirit of ancient legends. There is something reminiscent of the frames from Milcho Manchevski’s films in the lyrical passages of this novel.
The author displays particular mastery in the subtle texture woven with details and facts referring to the time in which the novel is set, and which have historical, even political weight. This is not a classical historical novel, as it relies on archetypal and universal topics, so a wrong tone would sound especially wrong in this sense, but there are no such things here.
The Serbian edition also includes an instructive foreword by Mr.Venko Andonovski, one of the most prominent Macedonian writers of the previous generation (Andonovski was born in 1964), the end of which reads:
“All in all, Infidelity by Mr.Trajkoski is a rise of a fully matured prose author, which I find him to be a very pleasant surprise. He is also an exceptional phenomenon in our literature – he is not satisfied by the tradition but he does not reject it either: he is seeking a new form and he already stepped through the doorway of discovering it.”
The Macedonian original of the book was published in 2014. The translation in other foreign languages (in addition to Serbian we also have Armenian, English and Albanian) show that the significance of this book is recognized on a wider scale as well. Infidelity is a novel that definitely deserves the readers’ attention.
