Novel
The Big Water
Големата вода
Živko Čingo · 1971
Synopsis
In the spring of 1946, Lem, aged twelve, enters a freezing orphanage, a former asylum surrounded by a high wall, where children described as enemies of the people are shut away. A domineering former partisan runs it, assisted by a deputy expert in bullying and by an insomniac bell-ringer; there, children learn to inform on one another. Lem is entrusted with a bad comrade, Isaac Keiten, a laughing dreamer, who invents the Big Water: through a hole in the wall, the two boys watch for this imagined water, which becomes their antidote to confinement.
Context
The book appeared from Makedonska kniga in 1971. Maria Bežanovska translated it into French as early as 1980, for L'Âge d'homme, from a Serbo-Croatian version, then directly from the Macedonian for the Nouvel Attila reissue in 2016. An English translation by Elizabeth Kolupacev Stewart appeared in 2004, an Italian one in 2018. Ivo Trajkov made a free adaptation of it as a film in 2004, which turns the narrator into an old politician remembering his childhood.
Who it is for
A short novel, of about one hundred and sixty pages, carried by a child's monologue. It is better to accept a story with almost no action, in a style close to incantation.
Prizes and reception
French critics see in it a rare pearl and a universal parable; in its author's home town, it is called an iconic novel.
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