The Navel of the Light

• A Novel in Three Fonts and One Illuminated Manuscript
• Venko Andonovski

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The novel The Navel of the Light by award-winning Macedonian author Venko Andonovski is a spiritual and literary extension of the author's previous work The Navel of the World from 2000, and explores deep philosophical and moral dilemmas, posing the question of how an individual copes with the crisis of meaning in contemporary society. Andonovski skillfully and lucidly plays with time and space, temporal discontinuity, but also with one of the eternal obsessions of the human race – immortality.
The three main stories take place during three historical periods, with (non)random synchronicities between them, and cover several key themes: loyalty, eternity, someone else's sin and one's own sinlessness. The game with existence in multiple periods (or in multiple parallel universes) is simultaneously supported by a dynamic narrative in which there is no coincidence, with a multitude of metatextual remarks that boil down to the question – is storytelling given to us so that we can understand that everything is simultaneously the present, the past and the future?

* * *

What happened happened very quickly. And it took a lot of time, calendar-wise: spring and summer. Measured by the world clock, it was not even a single second. A devil's second, in which eons and eons are placed. What a man builds his entire life, one devil's second will carry away like a torrent. Because man is the devil's favorite garment. He will find a horned man somewhere on the roads, squeezed out like an empty piece of clothing, without God in him, and he will dress him. And he will carry him on; everywhere with him on the face of the Earth, everywhere the scoundrel will start his work, he will carry him like a vest woven with silver until he takes it out, until it takes the shape of his dishonorable body, because it is known that clothing, from shirt to trousers to shoes, can be adapted and trampled according to the one who wears it.

• ISBN: 978-953-369-061-2
• Dimensions: 130 x 190 mm
• Number of pages: 320
• Cover: paperback
• Year of the edition: 2025
• Original title: Papokot na svetlinata
• Original language: Macedonian
• Translation: Borislav Pavlovski