Misery Loves Solitude
Lidija Dimkovska vs. the Sheitgeist
Obliquely and intriguingly, the dystopian imagination of Lidija Dimkovska’s 2023 novel Personal Identification Number puts me on alert.
In a 2023 essay, “How America Got Mean,” David Brooks warned in The Atlantic that “in a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world. The words that define our age reek of menace,” he said, and provided a catalogue: “conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces.”
I feel you, Dave. I am blessed with loving family, friends, and community, but I too feel the mean-ing of America. I believe the causes are many, including COVID-induced paranoia and the way phones fill our eyeballs and empty our sense of self. Social media algorithms are kind to violence, boosting the outraged and the outrageous. And now we can, if we choose, follow the lead of a blatantly corrupt and divisive President, a champion of greed, falsehood, and cruelty toward the vulnerable.
It’s not so hard, apparently, to make America hate again. On the level of the street, meanness is viral. Check out how people push past one another in a crowd, how they drive, in overbuilt cars and trucks outfitted like tanks. How they talk to each other! I’ve lived in New York’s hustle/bustle for 50 years, but this time feels different. Are We the People, still a we?
Back in the turbulent Sixties, when I learned the term zeitgeist (the spirit of the times), I shared with fellow wise-guys in the eighth-grade my term sheitgeist (the spirit of a shitty time). (I believed I had made it up.) I had in mind Cambodia and Kent State and the standoff in Pine Ridge and the burning in cities and other instances of general mayhem. But lately, I’m afraid, I’m learning just how sheit-y a time can be. And also looking for fresh ways to clear the air.
I found some of that oxygen in Lidija Dimkovska’s prize-winning 2023 Personal Identification Number (Единствен матичен броj). The novel is a mosaic of brokenness—in a family, in certain locales, in the zeitgeist. Aptly perhaps, Christina Kramer’s English translation is still available only in fragments—an opening section appearing in World Literature Today and a passage from late in the novel on Asymptote.
In her 2013 novel A Spare Life, Dimkovska used the metaphor of conjoined twins to embody the painful breakup of Yugoslavia. Here another metaphor, “the wasteland” (pustelija in Macedonian), ties together personal trauma, destructive geopolitics, and social alienation. The text weaves a counterpoint between the literal story of the narrator’s dysfunctional Macedonian-Cypriot family and a fanciful elaboration on the idea of the wasteland. At first just a thought experiment expressing alienation, the wasteland by the end takes actual (well, fictional actual) form in a Macedonian town 200 kilometers east of Skopje. You still with me?
The term enters the novel through the narrator’s memories of her late father, a man frustrated and asthmatic. In Macedonia, severed from his family in Cyprus, he was prone to silent retreat when confounded by personal difficulties, declaring, “A man needs to find a wasteland.” The narrator explains:
“My father repeated this sentence whenever something wasn’t the way he thought it should be, when [brother] Stefan would cause trouble or when I’d do something he considered trouble, but most often it was when my mother would comment on things better left unspoken.…maybe it was really another word for some barren place like a desert. I knew about the Sahara from the atlas. But why would my father be talking about finding a desert? Why would someone go looking for a desert?”1
Her search for an answer drives the novel, and leads her to link her father’s disaffection to broader social currents.
She takes us to the Cypriot town of Famagusta, where Varosha, a beach resort abandoned when the Turks invaded in 1974, still stands empty. Varosha had been an early ‘70s playground for the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Brigette Bardot, Paul Newman, Richard Burton, Abba, and Sophia Loren. It was in that glittery heyday that her parents met: her mother come from Macedonia for seasonal hotel work, her father a local-born custodian in the hotel. Reminiscent of how Dimkovska introduced readers to the remote reaches of Sicily in Grandma Non-Oui, here she brings us to an all-but forgotten ghost town, one of the many scraps of territory laid waste by larger forces around the world (Gaza, Aleppo, Bucha, you name ’em).2
The narrator, we learn, is an academic researcher looking into how communes form and fail. In pursuit of a bold finding, she comes up with the concept of the wasteland, inspired by her father’s story (and maybe by the desolation of Varosha, his hometown). The eureka moment comes as she is lying in a beauty spa in Bristol one year to the day after his death:
“I drew from my mind the comparison between a commune and a wasteland as two radical counterparts….my father wanted to find a wasteland, not a commune, consciously wanting to alienate himself, not draw closer.”
She rushes off to London to expand on the idea with her colleague Helen:
“Unlike the commune where people enter to live together, day and night, in good and bad, there are people who want to find a wasteland, to live alone, separated from others, for whom it’s better, or who think it’s better, in silence, alone, uncommunicative, alone with their own egos! In a commune the inhabitants strive for closeness, but in a wasteland they seek refuge in the lack of intimacy! The wasteland is a society in which it is possible to live for oneself, as independent from others as possible, more alone, more antisocial, more taciturn. Or louder, but still alone with themselves. An intentional society of alienated individuals! The complete opposite of the communes! Completely opposite!”
Helen is wary at first. Not so, it turns out, her parents, who are enthusiastic Brits with powerful connections. They see in it an idea with start-up potential and, like other Western Europeans with money, see in Macedonia a kind of tabula rasa. They arrange financing for a buyout of a near-abandoned town, and soon the project is launched. The resulting wasteland, we see, reading between the lines, is a dark enterprise, a post-socialist distillation of the kind of alienated self-interest that makes David Brooks, and many of us, wring our hands.
So, how does this all help clear the air? As Helen points out, the narrator’s intellectual leap has taken us from her family’s woes to a dystopia of “Orwell, Huxley, Atwood.” In fact, the result may be even worse than the authoritarian worlds of 1984, Brave New World, or The Handmaid’s Tale, because, after all, people choose the wasteland. It is “an intentional society of alienated individuals.”
But that also maybe makes it better, because they (and we) do in fact have the power to make other choices. Like other dystopias, this one calls us urgently to attention, casting a surgically bright light on pathologies. But if, as here, the illness lies within us, then maybe so does the cure. Though set in very particular and far off circumstances, the hyberbolic wasteland illuminates growing social alienation here in the US. And without a hint of didactic, calls us to resist.
So, I‘ll take the medicine and read the whole novel when published in English. And I’ll do so with the hope that after a journey through Dimkovska’s real and imagined underworlds—the sadness of a family, the post-apocalyptic ruins of Varosha, the moral bankruptcy of the wasteland—I and other readers might just return stronger, eyes open wider, better inoculated against the sheitgeist.
Here’s Christina Kramer, from an Asymptote interview, on the difficulty posed by the word pustelija:
“In my translator’s note I focused on the problem of the translation of the Macedonian word pustelija—a deserted, empty place, which I translated as ‘wasteland.’ When choosing this word, the father’s repetition of the odd phrase, “A man needs to find a wasteland,” also proved challenging. I didn’t want to use any word that would suggest a rural space, like boondock, backwater, or hinterland, and escape to a desert island now feels cartoonish. The word also needed to connote a spiritual wasteland. However, I was avoiding ‘wasteland’ because the word carries with it a long literary history from Chretien de Troyes through Wolfgang von Eschenbach to T. S. Eliot. In the end, however, the wasteland’s connection to a wound, or war, or the failure to ask the question seemed the right answer after all.
A BBC report from 2014 paints a vivid picture of the Varosha wasteland. How could I not know about this ghost town of a resort? Just before COVID, the local government declared an intention to reopen Varosha, despite a UN resolution forbidding Turkish settlement, and has moved ahead slowly despite political opposition. Despite the Northern Cypriot government’s optimistic (and maybe illegal) intentions to open up a new “Las Vegas on the Mediterranean,” for now it remains a pustelija.