"A Spare Life" by Lidija Dimkovska

It makes for grim reading, this 490-page novel by Macedonian novelist Lidija Dimkovska (b. 1971). The relentless poverty, the constant cruelty, the grinding disappointments, the numerous deaths. It follows a pair of twin girls, conjoined at the head before the break-up of Yugoslavia through the birth of the Republic of Macedonia, taking in its epic span an immigrant's life in London. Yet the grimness is compelling for me for a number of reasons. I do not know much about the conditions of life in post-Communist Balkans, and this novel paints in a vivid, but never showy, manner the ordinary grayness of it all. I must also confess to a morbid fascination with the phenomenon of conjoined twins, and this novel describes the many aspects of life that such a phenomenon must affect, from walking to going to the bathroom to studying to dating to getting married, and having sex; no part of life is left untouched, and so the reader live through it all with Zlata and Sreba. Then there are the more objective reasons for the compulsive read that the novel is. The friendship and enmity between sisters. The love and hatred between parent and child. The connective tissue between states and peoples, and the separation, the wider political theme that the twins gesture towards but are never simplified into symbols of. There is only one point in the novel when I felt a misstep on the novelist's part. The story is told throughout from Zlata's point of view. She is sensitive, poetic, religious, self-pitying, fallible, in other words, wholly sympathetic. But when she insists on returning to Macedonia to give birth to her own twins and thereby causes the death of a beloved character, her action repulsed me, and I could never feel the same way for her again.

To write her Master's thesis in literature in London, Zlata interviews many émigré writers. What Dimkovska writes here resonates powerfully with me:

With each conversation, I grasped again and again that we both are, and are not, born as citizens. It's not only the soil upon which we were born that defines us, but all the ground we've trod, all the air we've breathed, all the people we've met, all the languages in which we've tested our power of transmutation. The person who writes is half chameleon, half stone. Before he dies, a worm in his soul says in his mother tongue: "Who are you? Who were you?" He dies before answering the question. The émigré writer has no answer to that question.