Book review: The Summer Without You by Petar Andonovski

Jon Gower

Fiction in translation is a surefire way of finding fascinating, often unusual reading matter and Welsh publisher Parthian has considerable pedigree in this regard. Witness the latest sparkling entry to their roster of translated fiction, this time a sunlit novella by one of the leading voices in Macedonian literature.

Petar Andonovski has one volume of poetry to his name, as well as five novels, one of which, Fear of Barbarians, won the 2020 European Prize for literature. The Summer Without You is an account of the effect of someone going missing on those who loved him. In this case it’s a famous writer Vlado who seems to just walk away from his life, leaving no farewell note and taking nothing with him. He joins mysterious legions of other missing persons, people who simply left one day and never, ever returned.

Disappearance

Vlado is one of those people who can make people laugh and has built a reputation for himself based on that ability. His disappearance leaves many questions in its wake, and leaves his lover hoping he is happy, imagining what might have happened, where he now lives:

I was imagining Vlado telling Ilinka Indira to take me back to the room, and him staying behind alone. Suddenly he realizes something in his life isn’t right, so he disappears into the darkness.
Years later, in an amusement park near the Panepistimio Station in Athens, a clown emerges from another darkness, and all the visitors gather around him. The clown is happy. Everyone loves him. He laughs. The crowd laughs too.

Absorbing account

Deftly translated by Christine E. Kramer, The Summer Without You is an involving and absorbing account of absence, as two men who both loved the missing author come to terms with his loss – bonding seemingly because of the love they share. It all happens as they holiday in a seaside location, where there are wild beaches away from the town where you can sunbathe in the nude, or get it on where the only prying eyes are those of the gulls. There are imagined sightings of Vlado but any trail that might lead to him soon grows cold.

There are also some fairly kooky local inhabitants. There’s the blind woman who dresses all in green, wears green glasses and walks the dog on a green leash. Then there are the twins Nita India and Mila India and their extremely beautiful mother Ilinka who looks like the widow in Zorba the Greek. There are some characters who are convinced they are reincarnated. It all makes for a slightly disconcerting but nevertheless entertaining New Age, beachside community.

Oddballs together

And when some of these oddballs get together to party in a local hotel called the Orlando it all gets mightily strange, with lines of people dressed as playing cards giving Tarot readings and there’s a man in a baby mask which resembles a pig. It all becomes a tad hallucinatory for a while, although the book slowly and cofidently drifts back into a quieter register as we piece together the lovers’ backstories, and find out about their families. Drifts is a good way of describing Andonovski’s style, taking you along sedately on the quiet currents of its sentences.

This is a sun-flecked book that lures you in quietly, like the shirr of waves inviting you in to paddle around, to meet its characters and delve into their complexities and family lives. There is little that is showy about the prose but it takes you like a guiding presence, reassuring you that life gets good in the end.

Mystery

And without giving too much away there is a deft resolution to the central mystery of Vlado’s disappearance. And it is satisfying. In the same way that this terse little tale is satisfying, as it tells us about love and its calibrations, how missing someone is perhaps another way to hug them even closer to your heart.

The Summer Without You by Petar Andonovski is published by Parthian Books and is available from all good bookshops.