RUMENA BUŽAROVSKA'S PAGE: Macedonian tale-teller new to the Anglophone reader

I'M NOT GOING ANYWHERE
RUMENA BUŽAROVSKA (tr. Steve Bradbury)
Dalkey Archive
$16.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Razor-sharp social commentary, Jane Austen for contemporary feminists unafraid to confront a dark world

In her latest translated volume of collected short fiction, Rumena Bužarovska delivers more of what established her as “one of the most interesting writers working in Europe today.” Already a bestseller across her native Macedonia, I’m Not Going Anywhere is an unsentimental and hyperrealist collection in which Macedonians leave their country of origin to escape bleakness—only to find, in other locales, new kinds of desolation in these dark, biting, and utterly absorbing stories.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Seven stories, all centering women and their feelings; few socially acceptable, none positive.

Not having participted in heterosexuality for quite some time now, I am left utterly verschmeckeled by its continued existence. Exactly no women whose writing gets attention write of happiness connected to men. In romantic fiction, after the couple is established, the story ends; and none of them start with happy straight people. Of my own personal knowledge, there are almost no women really happy in their state of making eternal compromises and settlings they make to maintain relationships to their men. Why are y'all bothering? It's not great for anyone involved to be in what amounts to prison with a cellmate you condescendingly tolerate at best, despise and detest at worst.

Well...no one's makin' me do it, so my only interest is an outsider's appalled fascination. Self-inflicted harm seems so wasteful. Not one of these stories is going to challenge my observation's validity; that Author Bužarovska is a multi-award-winning chronicler of straight women's experience suggests to me that she's on to something or the kudos wouldn't flow.

Strap in...we're headin' into the venerable institution of the Bryce Method to examine a little of what she is talking about in this collection.

The Vase reminds me of the drunken fights, the rage and hatred of being Stuck, stuck with-stuck in-stuck under, that there bursts out the sudden overpowering need to break shit just to make the world hurt a little bit like you are. That time in my own life was hellish. It's all right here in a few pages.

With every drink I am getting more and more pissed at him, and at his mother for not dying. The idea that she is sitting there all sick and hideous in her living room like a neglected houseplant, watching stupid soap operas all day, enrages me.

The poison of disappointment and the rage of thwarted entitlement eat caustically away until they spill out, paradoxically, as acid recrimination. 4 unhappy stars

Blackberries charts the course of a passive, purposeless thirty-three year old as she aimlessly moves towards the scene of a dreamlike past to test whether she was even real as a child. Her memories of the place guide her in opening the old cottage her grandparents had. The scenes of domestic contentment shining in front of her dingy present include memories of a vivid friend from that past; these seem to conjure the now-woman from the stones, summon her back to this crumbling haunt from her passionate intense life in the US. A tiny flicker of life, a spark of connection, then the fog descends again.

Was it even real? Does it matter if it isn't? She is never going to burst into glorious flower, like her childhood friend. There is no mass in her to go critical. 4 stars

I flick on the living room light: it works. I flick on all the light switches: everything is working; nothing is amiss. But it can't be, I say to myself. Nothing is ever right. That's just how it looks.

Tsi-Tse brings the cost of settling instead of settling down to the diametric opposite of the earlier stories' impoverished as well as unhappy lives. Elena thought she escaped Macedonia's grinding poverty by marrying an American man with a good job and moving to New Mexico. She found loneliness, isolation, and motherhood's endless unmeetable demands. She also failed to disentangle herself from her ill, needy father. Returning to Skopje when he has a stroke, she's in the eternally tempting path of cheating because her high-school crush Jovan has been in email contact...ain't the twenty-first century grand?...and the lure of Home is so deep...dreams are, after all, deepest when one is dreaming. Pesky reality has no chance to screw things up in dreams. Pity dreams can't last. 4 stars

I'm Not Going Anywhere is Riste-the-incel's humiliated homecoming to his Mama in Skopje after his hottie wife and teenaged daughter finally work up the nous to trade up men. The escape to Australia that he participated in gave them the scope to do better than his bitter, furious, abusive self. Now he's unloading all his pent-up anger on his mother, a portly, poor, elderly woman whose life has clearly been spent as some man or another's dogsbody.

After throwing a tantrum about his mother's goulash being inferior, he storms off to get some veal and show her how it's done. This leads ro a reckoning with his past that he clearly expected to go differently than it did. I found spending time in Riste's company thoroughly unpleasant. 3.5 stars

Medusa pilots us to what, from the off, I was certain was going to be a grisly cocktail party with a pair of Balkan academics visiting some very, very nouveau riche fellow-countrymen in that couple's ever-so-new-money new-build mansion. It doesn't help that the guest's husband is in the sights of the host's wife....

We've been to that party, or at least those of us over a certain age have, and it's a grim, brutal evening. In this telling of it, it very much is that awful, brutal evening for all concerned. 4 stars

Cherokee Red brutalizes a gay kid with a homophobic father whose immigrant status marks the whole family out in ever-so-sunny, ever-so-hot Phoenix...about as far from Macedonia geographically and culturally as a place on Earth can get.

You never know what words will fall where they can do the most damage, do you, and yet there most people are spouting the most revolting kind of hatred and ignorance without a care in the world. Bitter anger, hatred, self-loathing all wound up in a bloated, bombastic, shouting boozehound's nightmarish effusion demonstrating his nithingness. 4 stars

The 8th of March plunged me back into the bad memories of being in alcoholic relationships. The utter, appalling humiliation of Vesna-the-drunk stirred up bad old days, and brought a giant rush of anxiety my way. Horrifyingly cruel, this portrait of self-pity and utter, abject, appallingly public humiliation is easily the most perfectly realized of the whole collection. No alcoholic needs any help destroying their life, but sometimes Life provides them a stage. Harrowing. 5 stars

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MY HUSBAND
RUMENA BUŽAROVSKA (tr. Paul Filev)
Dalkey Archive
$15.95 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Adulterers, cheats, hypocrites, bad seeds—in My Husband, Rumena Bužarovska turns her wry and razor-sharp gaze on men, and on the lives of the women who suffer them.

In these eleven devastatingly precise and psychologically unsettling stories, we follow the female protagonists’ thwarted attempts at intimacy, ranging from pretense, to denial, to violent and ultimately self-destructive acts. This smart, funny, provocative collection demonstrates the profound skills that have made Rumena Bužarovska one of the finest contemporary writers of short fiction in Macedonia. This story collection Mojot Maž in Croatian, (My Husband in English), won the Edo Budiša Award for Best Short Story Collection.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: At eight or nine pages apiece, these stories can't be subjects of my usual Bryce method of synopsizing each one individually. That way spoilers lie, and y'all're very likely to go nuts about them spoilers. In a certain way, though, no matter what I say it'll be a spoiler because in eleven stories nothing changes. Women marry cads and bounders and abusive jackasses who treat them like dirt. Much of a muchness, then.

The reason I finished the book was that the author's voice, as translated by Paul Filev, is raw, blunt, almost brutally rageful; never less than seethingly aware of the injustice of "belonging" to a man and being subject to his will and whims. I cartainly won't re-read it. I'm glad I did read it in the first place. It's the first work translated from Macedonian that I've read. The author seems to be, based on the limited biographical information I can find in English, a big literary light in Macedonia.

Based on this first collection of hers to appear in English, I can see why. Her sort of caustic honesty isn't going to be to everyone's taste, but I found it to be to mine.