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CONTEXT / КОНТЕКСТ 23, 2021
a typical Turkish architecture, translator’s note) in
which silence was as soft as cotton… Going back
to myself and tekija…I loved it and I still do. It is
quiet and clean, it is mine, it smells of the kaloper
plant in the summer and of snow and wind in the
winter, I love it also because it became famous be-
cause of me, because it knows secrets I have never
told anyone, the secrets I kept hidden even from
myself. It is warm, it is quiet, pigeons coo on the
roof in the early morning, rain falls on the tiles,
keeps falling even now, tirelessly, incessantly…
(Selimović, 2001: 9-10) This house represents a
home, a homeland, a place that denes one’s iden-
tity among other people. It represents a wholeness
of homeland elements, being a clear-cut contrast
to the Macedonian house located in Belgrade and
as such it is a very interesting contrast-comparing
example. Stanislav sees the country’s degradation,
but says what is that compared to the falling apart
of the entire world such as his daughter’s sickness.
Andrea Zlatar in her book Vocabulary of the body
(Rječnik tijela, translator’s note): All traces on our
body (scars, wrinkles, dark spots, birthmarks, bro-
ken capillaries..) represent a kind of geographical
map on which traces of our own, personal histories
are written. (Zlatar, 2010: 112) Which traces of
human souls united in family stories are contained
in those houses that found their refuge in another
country, built in a familiar architecture style, with
no traditional replace inside and how much sense
is there to search for the childhood memories in a
plasticity of a replace built by the imposed so-
ciety rules…
The Age of Reindeer is centered around the
question of Kiril’s, Ana’s, Dondone’s and Klavdi-
ja’s identity, as well as that of Don Quixote and of
the book itself. Just as Andrea Zlatar writes: The
identity is not one, nobody has only one identity,
although every man is identical to himself. At the
same time, everybody participates in dierent types
of identity, from individual to group and collective
identities, everybody accepts dierent roles in the
society, recognizes or does not recognize herself or
himself in dierent persons. (Kos Lajtman, 2011:
16) In light of that, in his inaugural speech in 2007
Mitko Madžunkov said: If we get carried in a cof-
n out of Jugoslavija, we know where we will be
buried, but if we get carried out of Macedonia -
where will our grave be…As explained in the vo-
cabularies, reindeer is a ruminant from the family
of true deer and is the only mammal in the world
capable to see the ultraviolet light, invisible to hu-
mans. At the end of the novel Klavdija says: If only
the world and life had a common name that encom-
passes the entire time (Madžunkov, 2018: 363) and
Ana, through Kiril’s words says its name would be
the age of reindeer…We last as long as they live,
in other words it is the ultraviolet time invisible to
man, but in fact it’s only what Klavdija calls the
understanding of someone’s tragedy only after our
own ruminating of everything that happened to the
person next to us. The world needs reindeer.
Mitko Madžunkov, a novelist, a playwright,
an essayist, was born in Strumica, Macedonia. For
more than thirty years, until his retirement, he lived
and worked in Belgrade, Serbia. In 2006 he left Bel-
grade and returned to Macedonia. He was awarded
a Macedonian national award, his works are inclu-
ded in foreign anthologies and translated in seve-
ral languages. He translates literary works and is a
member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences
and Arts. In an interview for the publishing house