Luan Starova

This multi-volume Balkan saga traces the author's family line from the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century to the collapse of Yugoslavia at the close of that century, crossing borders, identities, languages, religions, and genres. The novel explores the nature of boundaries through the metaphor of an eel, a fish that has for centuries crossed human-imposed borders in its migratory journey from its adopted home in the Balkans to its birthplace in the Sargasso Sea.

Luan Starovan romaani "Vuohien aika" on tragikoominen kuvaus monilapsisen albaaniperheen olemassaolon taistelusta Skopjessa, Jugoslavian osatasavallan Makedonian pääkaupungissa, pian toisen maailmansodan jälkeen. Perheen isä on kirjojensa parissa viihtyvä älykkö, ja köyhän kaupunginosan muiden asukkaiden tavoin perhe pitää henkensä pitimeksi muutamaa vuohta. Asukkaiden ja kaupungin valtaapitävien välit kiristyvät, kun sosialistinen hallinto päättää vuohien hävittämisestä ja paimenten muuttamisesta moderniksi työväenluokaksi. Vuohien ja ihmisten suhdetta kuvatessaan kirjailija pohtii Balkanin historiaa ja pienten ihmisten koettelemuksia historian pyörteissä, aikakausien, hallintojen ja aatteiden vaihtuessa. Kansalaisten vastarintaa johtavan vuohipaimenen kohtalo tuo tarinaan myyttisiä piirteitä. Kirjailija Luan Starova on syntynyt vuonna 1941 Pogradecissa Albaniassa, Ohridjärven rannalla, ja on muuttanut perheensä mukana jo lapsuudessa Makedoniaan. Hän kirjoittaa sekä albaniaksi että makedoniaksi. Kirjailijan laajaan tuotantoon kuuluu mm. romaaneja, kertomuksia, runoja ja esseitä, ja hän on myös kääntänyt kirjallisuutta. "Vuohien aika" on osa "Balkanilainen saaga" -nimistä teossarjaa, joka perustuu kirjailijan ja hänen sukunsa kokemuksiin. Luan Starovan kirjoja on käännetty yli 20 kielelle.

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.

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.