Goce Smilevski (Гоце Смилевски)
Goce Smilevski (born 1975), Yugoslavia; Macedonia.
Smilevski (SMEE-lef-skee) was born in Skopje, the capital and main city of Macedonia, then a republic of Socialist Yugoslavia.
He studied at Saints Kiril and Metodij University in Skopje, at Charles University in Prague, and at Central European University
in Budapest (at CEU he was in the Gender Studies program).
Sestrata na Zigmund Frojd was first published in 2011 and was translated into English by Christina Kramer (professor of
Slavic and Balkan Languages and Linguistics at the University of Toronto). The book has been very successful; it won the EU Prize
for Literature in 2010 (NB: before it was published), and was welcomed by the Anglophone press, among others, in a three-page
review by Joyce Carol Oates in the New York Review of Books. That review, unfortunately, didn't mention the quality
of the translation at all - but still, Joyce Carol Oates! The Author's Note at the opening of our edition gives some
thought-provoking information on Smilevski's reasons for undertaking this novel. Freud's writings have been hugely influential
in Western culture; they are no longer the unmediated basis for psychotherapeutic practice or the study of psychology, but they
are still widely read by scholars in all kinds of fields and by amateurs as well. (His theories are often based on myths or
on literary representations {he was very taken with Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov, for instance}, and scholars have
often used him as the basis for psychoanlytic or decontructionist readings of literary works.) Among other things, Freud was a
very fine writer, though that's not always visible in translations of his work, which could tend to make him sound ponderous, to
use Latin words (id, ego) for words that were in German in the original (to make them sound more "mythical" and significant?).
In any case, by choosing the sister of such a well-known figure and putting that figure's name in the title, Smilevski ensured that
reader would pick up the book and take a look inside.
Questions for Reading:
- How much do you know about Sigmund Freud?
- Taking what you do know about Freud, how would you expect his sister to write?
- How does this story impact your opinion of Freud, and does your opinion evolve over the course of the novel?
- How much is Sigmund Freud's family, including all his sisters, complicit in making him feel that he's the most important
one and can impose his own desires and priorities on the others?
- How much of this fictional autobiography seems representative of women of a certain class at this point in Central Europe?
- What do you make of the mental hospital where Adolfina spends some time? - Are the sections of the narrative located in the
hospital different in any way from the rest of the novel?
- Ponder the ironies of this woman being named Adolfina.
- How do the chronological events of Adolfina's life (what Viktor Shklovsky labeled fabula) and the order of events
in the text (siuzhet) differ, and what is the effect of this tension or distinction for the reader?
- How does gender play out in the novel?
- With the name "Freud" anywhere nearby, a reader today would expect the presence of sex. Is the sex in the novel what you expected,
if indeed you had expectations?
- How are other characters presented, and what does their fate suggest?
- In particular, what is the effect of having famous characters appear in the narrative (or relatives of famous cultural
figures)?
- What kind of "spin" does the novel, especially its ending, put on the reader?
Other books by Smilevski:
- Conversation with Spinoza: A Cobweb Novel, translated from the Macedonian by Filip Korženski, 2006. The original,
Razgovor so Spinoza, was published in 2003. At the time, scholars and fans of Balkan literatures were commenting that
the title already makes clear that the novel is not limited to its own time and place (Baruch or Benedict de Spinoza, 1632-1677,
lived in the Netherlands). Freud's Sister makes the same claim to the right to write about anything the author has
chosen, including the most prominent cultural figures.
- He has written a lot of other stuff, but it hasn't been translated into English yet. At the moment there's a nice interiew
in a link at the bottom of Smilevski's official web page: http://gocesmilevski.com/
If you liked this book, you might take a look at:
- Lidija Dimkovska, A Spare Life, 2016, translated from the Macedonian by Christina Kramer. (Originally Rezerven
život, 2012.)
- Petra Hůlová, All This Belongs to Me, 2009, translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker. (Originally Paměť mojí
babičce - "The [Or: In?] Memory of My Grandmother" - 2002. The first novel by a Czech writer, it is set in Mongolia
and presents another case of a writer from Central Europe claiming the right to treat any subject, rather than lingering on
"local" themes and areas.