“BOOKSTAR” 2024
Transformations are where logic gives way to fantasy and no one complains about it.
There is something incredibly strong and primordial in the transformations that we have come to call also: metamorphoses, changes, conversions, transitions. They are an integral part of life and existence almost as much as they are an integral part of literature and other artistic forms. Can anyone remain indifferent to the transformations of butterflies? To the frogs and the grasshoppers? The ladybugs? Without prior scientific foreknowledge, would you believe your eyes when you see how the butterfly breaks away from the cocoon, which just a little while ago was a caterpillar, and before that – an egg? Without school lessons in biology, would we believe those who would convince us that the elongated tadpoles that swim like fish in the shallows will grow into frogs that lazily jump among the reeds?
If we listen to the evolutionists, then the human race itself is the result of such a miraculous and no less incredible transformation spread over millions of years, for which no counterpart can be found in any work of art. Miraculous transformations have been and will be all around us and they do not belong only to the imagination of creative people.
But in literature, writers do not have the luxury of translating the changes of their characters across the bridge of hundreds or thousands of years. Nor should they interpret them with scientific predispositions. Metamorphoses in fiction happen in one way or another – through Circa's magic or through the supernatural intervention of a dream – but they happen suddenly, like a burst of pyrotechnics on a theatrical stage, blinding and powerful and with irreversible consequences. From man to woman, from living being to object, from man to animal, from Jekyll to Hyde, from child to adult, from real person to fictional character. And all this but the other way around. Hundreds and hundreds of times literature has convinced us that the impossible can knock on our door as it knocked on Gregor Samsa in "Die Verwandlung" more than a century ago and he turned into an insect that will end up lonely and tragic. As Lucius, Orlando, Dorian Gray, Pinocchio... The ancient Greeks and Romans competed to write better metamorphoses(metamorphōsēs/ μεταμορφώσεις). Leta turns Niobe into stone, and the new men are created from the stones of Deucalion and Pyrrha. Transformations are among the most primordial ways in which human existence is designed. Transformations are where logic gives way to fantasy and no one complains about it.
The very process of creating literature represents one of the most significant transformations. When a white sheet of paper turns into a portal that leads to worlds that redefine the context that many perceive as the only possible one. Literature is a way to live the democracy of reality in all its visible and invisible aspects.
On the other hand, reading also represents a process of internal transformation in which, getting to know the stories and heroes, we connect with other people's feelings and through them, maybe just for a moment or for eternity, we realize that we are not alone – we suddenly get to know ourselves. And maybe for just a moment or for eternity we become someone else. Or something else.
But literature is not an escape. It is the change that needs to happen.
In the year that marks the centenary of the death of Franz Kafka and in which “BookStar” celebrates its first major anniversary, we find inspiration in the works that are powerful enough to turn the impossible into the possible, to make the unimaginable reach the pages of books as very likely and even – expected. Works that transcend the societies they come from, surpassing the boundaries of national literatures. These are works that are bigger than the moment and works for which the literary world is sometimes too narrow. And these works are written by authors who live the literature.
And they are now coming to Skopje for THE METAMORPHOSIS.