This week, our Editors-at-Large celebrate writers of children’s literature, experimental postmodern novels, and memoirs of oppression. From a celebration of a beloved poet in Mexico to a new novel by a novelist and comics scholar in North Macedonia, to a recently republished chronicle of Greece’s years under dictatorship, read on to learn more!
Sofija Popovska, Editor-at-Large, reporting from North Macedonia
“Forgetting is a modern phenomenon that goes beyond the usual individual, medical frameworks,… because it is already an instrument for political and wide(r) scale manipulation, embedded in… almost the whole society”, writes literary critic Gligor Stojkovski in the preface to the latest novel by the author Tomislav Osmanli. Known for diving deep into the problems of history and modernity, Osmanli zeroes in on collective forgetting as a pathological social force in Zaborav (Forgetting), his fifth novel.
Osmanli (b.1956 in Bitola) is a media critic, poet, screenplay writer, dramatist, and author of multiple prose works. His first novel won the Best Macedonian Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Balkanica Literary Prize and his scholarly work, Comics: Scripture of the Human Image, was the first example of comics studies published in Yugoslavia. With a father of Macedonian and a mother of Greek descent, Osmanli grew up trilingual—speaking Macedonian and Greek, and having been taught Aromanian by his paternal uncle. His work as an independent editor and member of the editing board of his nation’s oldest daily newspaper, Nova Makedonija, from 1991 to 1998, as well as his theoretical studies in political cinema, are visible in the themes of his fiction. His scholarly interests blend with his mixed cultural heritage and find expression in Zaborav, a postmodern tapestry of lives and languages.
Told almost entirely in present tense to illustrate the loss of connection between past and present, Zaborav renders a bleak social landscape where values and freedoms previously achieved are being obscured by false spectacle and slipping into oblivion. The novel’s characters, increasingly egotistical and politically repressed, are unable to resist hypercapitalism. To capture both the fragmentation and diversity of modern society, Osmanli weaves his text from documentary citations, fictional scientific language, multilingual speech, dialects, web-addresses, footnotes, and QR codes leading to musical pieces which complete the atmosphere of the passages where they are found. The philosopher Ferid Muhić, speaking at the novel’s launch, notes that Osmanli’s “suggestive, …original…, and deeply humanistic” novel creates awareness which acts as an antidote against the “pandemic” of “collective forgetting.”
René Esaú Sánchez, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Mexico
April ended with the commemoration of Children’s Day across Mexico. With this in mind, Librerías Gandhi, one of the biggest and most important bookstores in the country, decided to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Norma Muñoz-Ledo’s career. As a poet and novelist, Muñoz-Ledo’s stories and verses have always been dedicated to children, and she is responsible for providing thousands of Mexican kids with their very first reading experience.
When asked about this small but significant homage, Muñoz-Ledo smiled and giggled: “I didn’t do anything; it was all their initiative, and it has been quite wholesome to see some of my youngest readers take a picture with my books and share it through social media.” From family and motherhood to oral tradition and Mexican folklore, her books explore the many complexities of growing up in a rich and culturally diverse country.
After studying Education in Mexico City in her youth, Muñoz-Ledo knew that she wanted to write for children. “I moved to England and studied Children’s Literature at Warwick. Then my daughters came, and it just felt right to keep writing for them.” In the three decades of her career, she has written many beloved works, including Matemágicas (Santillana, 2001), Supernaturalia (Santillana 2012), and Bestiario de seres fantásticos (FCE, 2016). “I have an interest in exploring the otherness, whether it is an emotion, an experience such as death, or a knowledge or wisdom, such as oral tradition,” she has said. “Many people think that writing for children is easy, but it is probably one of the hardest genres to write,” she added. Her most recent poem, “Tú y yo” (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2021), is an illustrated conversation with Earth, where our home planet asks for love, care, and understanding from both kids and adults.
Christina Chatzitheodorou, Editor-at-Large, reporting on Greece
In April, Kastaniotis Editions republished Rea Galanaki’s book Pou Zei o Lukos (which translates to Where does the wolf live?), which has been out of print for decades. The new edition also has a new dedication: with a dedication “For friends, from ’67 to ’74.” The republication comes exactly fifty years after the 1974 fall of Greece’s eight-year-long dictatorship known as Chounta ton Sintagmatarchon. In the book, the author narrates her experience during these eight years. Her book does not solely focus on her own life; rather, she details how she lived throughout these eight years with her ‘parees’ — her friends. In a 2015 interview, Galanaki noted “a consistent feature of my literary, and not only literary, attitude”: “I am inspired by people (real or fictional, or something in between) who have faced a genuine and dramatic dilemma in their lives and suffered the consequences. Who have been liminal, and, therefore, remarkable. Who were forgotten by official history, though quite important in their time, like the heroes of my purely historical novels. Or, on the other hand, people who became invisible and voiceless to the passer-by on the main streets of today’s Athens, and became very numerous during the crisis.”
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Read more on the Asymptote blog:
- Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature (April 26, 2024)
- Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature (April 19, 2024)
- Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature (April 12, 2024)