[Parthian; 2024]

Tr. from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer

The triangle is one of geometry’s most basic forms. Three sides, three vertices—that’s it. In his treatise Elements, ancient Greek mathematician Euclid postulates that all triangles may be categorized by side (equilateral, isosceles, scalene) and by angle (right, acute, obtuse). Yet even with such limited parameters, the triangle has infinite variations—in geometry, as in life. Petar Andonovski’s new novel, The Summer Without You, published by Parthian and translated from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer, explores one such configuration: a lopsided love triangle, composed of three former classmates, that is at risk of coming apart.

Unfolding over a vacation in Greece, the novel begins after the narrator’s partner Vlado picks him up from a hospital in Skopje where he is receiving treatment for an ominous injury resulting from a balcony fall. But their relationship seems to have already run its course, haunted as they are by Ivan, the missing third member of their triangle. Resentfully stuck together, Vlado and the narrator are poles apart. The narrator, a librarian, is a quiet and thoughtful type who lives chiefly among books while Vlado is a charismatic actor who prefers to be at the center of attention. Living in Vlado’s shadow, the narrator bristles at his partner’s pretensions, seeing through the studied gestures meant to give “the impression that he’s saying something deep.” The two studiously refuse to acknowledge the absence of Ivan, who first brought them together. And so, as a last-ditch effort to revive their relationship, Vlado surprises the narrator with a trip to Crete.

In Andonovski’s writing, islands intimate estrangement, isolation, and a mildly bacchanalian form of despair. His earlier novel, Fear of Barbarians, fictionalizes the true story of a group of Chernobyl survivors who resettled on a remote island off the coast of Crete, emphasizing the liminality of islands and the divide between the new arrivals and the island’s leery residents. In The Summer Without You, the narrator’s feeling of disconnect on the island is reflected in Kramer’s translation through clipped sentences and impassive observations: “I felt a warm breeze on my neck. Shivers ran down my spine. I began to step forward. There was no railing. Just one step more separated me from death.” Andonovski reveals the narrator’s unflappable sense of authority, as he never stops to wonder whether his own perception is correct.

By the time the narrator and Vlado arrive in Crete, any passion that may have existed between them is long gone, and the two seem more bound by silence and bitterness than by love. Vlado assumes responsibility for bringing excitement to their trip, leading the narrator on a distinctly unsexy excursion to a nude beach: “As we lay next to one another, the only thing I felt was shame.” To avoid each other, the couple seeks out friendships with fellow travelers, including a yogi mother and her two children as well as a Bosnian bar owner. But the narrator continues to bristle at Vlado’s charisma: “The last thing I wanted on this island were Macedonians who would recognize Vlado and chase after him the whole time.” Their last chance slipping away, the narrator wakes up one morning to find Vlado missing. As he searches, he fears that Vlado has disappeared. But when the narrator finally finds him, Vlado, the actor, has decided to take on the role of someone else: Ivan.

For it is Ivan, the third vertex of the triangle, who completes their relationship. The narrator, raised in a cramped apartment in a provincial city with his mother and grandmother, grew up with neither books nor any sense of joy: “Laughing was for rich people. We had no right to laugh.” After he moves to Skopje for university, he first meets Ivan in a literature class. Coming from a home full of books and art, Ivan represents the glowing life that the narrator aspires toward: “He was always different from the others. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to have his self-assurance, to dress like him, to think like him, to speak like him, to have read the books he had read.” As the two bond, the narrator seeks to cut any ties to his past and enmesh himself in Ivan’s life. To the narrator, Ivan is more an ideal than a person.

The narrator recalls the one summer he spent living with Ivan while in university: “That was the most wonderful period of my life. We went out every night and came back drunk at dawn.” The two experience a passionate and youthful romance, but a new semester brings a premature end to their affair. Ivan, it turns out, has a tendency to disappear, and the narrator is left waiting—and yearning—for him. When Ivan finally returns, he introduces the narrator to Vlado. The trio promptly enter into a relationship that brings them together but depends on three equal sides. When the narrator once seeks out Ivan on his own, he is rebuffed.

Quite a lot of story is packed into The Summer Without You, considering that the book is a mere eighty pages. Perhaps as a result of this brevity, several characters and plot points remain vague or unexplored. For example, the brief passages describing the throuple’s early years feel rushed and sparse in detail—more summarizing than lingering in the complexity of their precarious dynamic. Similarly, the narrator’s grim childhood feels more told than shown. He recalls a photograph of his grandmother: “She’s smiling. It’s only in that photograph that I’ve seen her laughing. The whole time we lived together, she was always gloomy.” The reader is left wanting either more or less about the narrator’s upbringing.

But it is Ivan’s character that remains the most loosely sketched—as if, even in memory, he is hard to pin down. His most compelling trait is that he’s unreliable and fickle: “Ivan frequently changed friends. He would meet someone and then would talk excitedly about them for days, but then he’d meet someone else, and he’d forget about the previous one.” Ivan’s fuzzy outlines render him even more ghostly—a vessel for the narrator’s aspirations and the unfillable hole in both his relationship and the past. Indeed, with only access to the narrator’s perspective, the reader is left to guess at the feelings and frustrations of both Vlado and Ivan, who serve more as reference points to triangulate the narrator’s own feelings. The distance between the three of them only emphasizes the imbalance of the relationship.

Ivan’s shapelessness, however, is no accident, for it is he, rather than Vlado, who really disappears. On a final trip the three of them took to Crete years before, Ivan abandons them for a woman he meets—and disappears from their lives entirely. Left without him, the narrator and Vlado cling to one another, yet they are unable to compensate for the missing side of their triangle: “But there was always an emptiness between us. Ivan’s absence always followed us.” In the intervening years, they never mention Ivan, who goes on to become a famous writer, marries the woman he met on their trip, and has a child.

And so, when the narrator finds Vlado on their present trip, it is Ivan who Vlado decides to impersonate: “He had completely changed. The clothes he wore, the way he spoke, his body language, every movement was familiar to me.” He begins leaving notes for the narrator at the hotel’s front desk to arrange a series of rendezvous—signed by Ivan. Whatever Vlado’s aims, the arousal and interest that he stimulates in the narrator only confirms his doubts: “Vlado had understood that without Ivan, the two of us didn’t exist. He was what joined us together.” In all his elusiveness, Ivan is a chimera that haunts the two of them, promising all that they lack.

Despite its setting on the sun-soaked coast of Crete, The Summer Without You shivers with the cold reckonings of disillusionment and adulthood as the narrator is faced with the reality of his life—so different from what he had envisioned when he was younger, so lacking in the intimacy the three of them once shared. Yet his relationship with Vlado only exists as a triangle, even if the third vertex is merely a ghost. A substitute for many things, Ivan lives on inside both of them. Without him, they’d have no shape at all.

Eamon McGrath is a writer currently based in Brooklyn. He writes about literature from Southeastern Europe on Instagram @balkanbooks. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Asymptote, and the Chicago Review of Books, among other places.


 
 
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