First published:
2023
ISBN: 978-608-230-929-3
Pages: 310
Format:
Cover: Paperback
Language: Macedonian
Translations: Slovenian.Translations will soon be available in bulgarian and croatian
Genre: Fiction, novel
Synopsis
Katerina Avram, a young woman from Skopje, talks about her dysfunctional family and her refugee father from Cyprus who never talks about his past. His life is marked by the sentence "A man should go to hell!" which becomes a driving force for Katerina, in her eternal search for her father's identity, in Skopje, Bristol, London and Varosha. Parallel to the story of the life of the Avram family, the story of Pustelija - an anti-community in which people who want to be alone and alienated and have no interpersonal relations, voluntarily move.
Reviews
Dimkovska's novel Personal Identification Number is a grotesque of the lost and deteriorated family values, of the estranged society only interested in profit, of the lost individuals who feel as if they have wandered into this world that they no longer know and recognize as their own.
Biljana Ilikj-Geroska
Growing up in post-Yugoslav and newly formed Macedonia, whose name she is not even allowed to mention at the meeting in Bristol and even less so at the quasi-border in Nicosia, will make Katerina ponder about a series of political issues, which lends to Dimkovska's prose a note of social activism and rebellion against disenfranchisement, by voicing the unanswered burning questions – another indication of the power of her written word. That's why in ‘Personal Identification Number’, in between the lines, she talks openly about women's rights, about the Macedonian and Cypriot issues, about Turkish-Greek relations, about the dreamed European paradise, about feminist principles...
Vlado Eftimov
The badlands is a leitmotif in the novel ‘Personal Identification Number’. It is a dystopian place that exists in a real space. The project for the badlands as an anti-commune meets the approval of the western business world and receives money for implementation. And where else if not in Macedonia, where there is no shortage of abandoned villages and towns. Thus the badlands becomes a modern start-up that is realized in our country with British money. A modern town in every modern sense of the word that anyone who wants to live alone can enter.
Violeta Tancheva-Zlateva
Personal Identification Number, the new novel by Lidija Dimkovska, talks about the empty spaces in our lives, about the extreme redundancy of our region, about the identity misunderstandings and about the emotional vacuum in the souls. It is a novel that will not leave anyone indifferent. Lidija Dimkovska gave the Macedonian literature another pearl, another extraordinary prose work.
Sasho Ognenovski
Personal Identification Number, the new title of one of the most successful Macedonian novelists, is a story about broken family relationships, about self-alienation and about remaining silent, which in no case can be a solution to problems. Dimkovska's novel explores borderline psychological states of the mind and presents readers with several characters that everyone can identify with in today’s rampage and alienation."
racin.mk