"A young heir to Gunter Grass and Jose Saramago, Smilevski might be the newest of a rare thing -- a living European novelist with a message for the future of his continent." - Joshua Cohen
Goce Smilevski was born in 1975 in Skopje, Macedonia.
He was educated
at the Charles University in Prague, at Central European University in Budapest
and at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, where he now works at the
Institute for Literature. He is the author of the novels CONVERSATION WITH
SPINOZA and SIGMUND FREUD'S SISTER. His works are translated into English,
Serbian, German, Slovenian, Polish and Croatian.
Was Sigmund Freud partially guilty for the death of his sisters in a death camp? That question arises at the very beginning of the novel Sigmund Freud's Sister: the year is 1938, Nazi Germany have just occupied Austria, and doctor Freud is allowed to make a list of people that will be able to leave Vienna and move with him to London. Freud wrote sixteen names on the list, including his maids, his wife's sister, his doctor and his family. But on the list of the people whose lives should be saved, the names of his sisters Adolfina, Paulina, Marie and Rosa were not included. The novel begins with the departure of Sigmund Freud, while his sisters are deported to a concentration camp. There Adolfina Freud becomes friend to Ottla Kafka, who is suffering from amnesia, and one of the few things she can remember from the past is the name of her brother Franz. Deprived of her own memory, Ottla asks Adolfina to share the story of her family, and thus on the pages of this novel revives Vienna of late 19th and early 20th Century, and the life of Sigmund Freud and his sisters.
Extract included in the anthology Best European Fiction 2010, edited by
Aleksandar Hemon, preface by Zadie Smith.
The novel will be published by: Dijalog (Macedonia), Penguin USA, Penguin UK, Alfaguara (Spain, Latin America&Spanish for USA), Belfond (France), Guanda (Italy), Bertrand/Record (Brazil), Fraktura (Croatia), Colibri (Bulgaria), Arhipelag (Serbia), Cankarjeva zalozba (Slovenia), Nyitott Konyvmuhely (Hungary), Nemesis (Turkey), Alfaguara/Objectiva (Portugal), Ambo Anthos (Netherlands), Kinneret (Israel), Gyldendal Norsk (Norway), Odeon (Czech Republic), Matthes&Seitz (Germany). Forthcoming: Slovakia, Russia, and the countries from Asia...
Extracts from promotional informaton by Guanda (the novel will be published in Italy in September 2011), announcing the novel as "publishing event of the year":
La scrittura di Goce Smilevski per la sua varieta del registro, la sua erudizione e precisione e stata accostata a Gunter Grass, Orhan Pamuk e Jose Saramago.
The writing of Goce Smilevski, for its variety of registry, its erudition and accuracy, has raised comparisons of its author to Gunter Grass, Orhan Pamuk and Jose Saramago.
Arriva da un piccolo paese balcanico il caso editoriale dell'anno.
The publishing event of the year comes from a small Balkan country.
Il romanzo di un giovanne autore macedone diventa un caso che sta conquistando l'editorio di tutto il mondo.
The novel of the young Macedonian author became a case because it conquered the publishers from all over the world.
"Smilevski's novel brings the thinker Spinoza, all inner life, into conversation with the outer, all-too-real facts of his life and his day--from his connection to the Jewish community of Amsterdam, his excommunication in 1656, and the emergence of his philosophical system to his troubling feelings for his fourteen- year-old Latin teacher Clara Maria van den Enden and later his disciple Johannes Casearius. From this conversation there emerges a compelling and complex portrait of the life of an idea--and of a man who tries to live that idea. Not only does Smilevski fulfill the difficult task of explaining Spinoza's dense ideas, dropping sly references to Darwin and Kundera into 17th-century Dutch life, but he makes a hidden life wonderfully manifest." - Publishers Weekly
"Without any doubt, the coordinates of perception can no longer remain the same after encountering the meetings in the threads of the novel Conversation with Spinoza by Goce Smilevski. In this imaginary conversation, Baruch Spinoza, the great rational philosopher from the seventeenth century, meets his co- talker whom, as it seems, he essentially missed his whole life. Through this extraordinary literary expedition, Goce Smilevski gives the Spinoza "hologram", usually projected onto the pages of the historic-philosophical studies, his peculiar double - a man of flesh and blood who paradoxically shares his lonely universe with all those existing, or to exist, similar to him." - Ana Dimishkovska, P.E.N. Review
