Novel
My Father's Books
Татковите книги
Luan Starova · 1992
Synopsis
The narrator, the son of the family who became a writer, recounts in some eighty fragments the life of his parents from 1926 to 1976, from the end of the Ottoman Empire to fascism and the Stalinist years. At the centre stands the father, a jurist trained in Islamic law in Istanbul, who saves his books and rare manuscripts from exile to exile, hiding his sacred texts behind propaganda pamphlets; around him, a family that passed from Albania into Yugoslavia and a lake that became a border.
Context
The novel appeared in Macedonian in 1992, then in Albanian in 1995, and opened the author's Balkan Saga, continued with Le Temps des chèvres and Le Musée de l'athéisme. Clément d'Içartéguy translated it into French for Fayard in 1998, working from both versions; a new edition published by L'Aube carries a preface by Edgar Morin, who sees the Balkans as lands of cultures nourished by East and West. The book has appeared in English as My Father's Books.
Who it is for
To understand the Balkans of the twentieth century through a family that borders never stopped displacing.
Prizes and reception
In L'Humanité, in 1999, Bruno Peuchamiel wrote that the novel "goes to the heart and illuminates Balkan complexity".