The Path of the Eels

The Path of the Eels

by Luan Starova

translated from the Macedonian by Christina E. Kramer

Luan Starova’s multi-volume Balkan Saga traces his family line from the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century to the collapse of Yugoslavia at the close of that century, crossing as it does borders, identities,  languages, religions, and genres.

The Path of the Eels, the third book from the saga to appear in English, explores the nature of boundaries through the metaphor of an eel, a being that has for centuries crossed human-imposed borders in its migratory journey from its home in the Balkans back to its birthplace in the Sargasso Sea.

Starova is an Albanian-Macedonian author and translator whose work provides new understandings of the Balkans, a region known in the West more for discord than discussion. A former professor of French literature and a  member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences, he is the author of more than eighteen works, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages.