Мy Husband
A talentless poet, a gynecologist who wants to an artist, an oppressive father, an impotent partner, a dead man, a meek ambassador… And their wives. Eleven narrators who become the hidden camera of their marriages, reflecting with ruthless irony on their husbands, on themselves, and on the questionable decision they made to wait until death do them part.
With devastating psychological precision, Bužarovska unearths the grotesque in the everyday and shines a stroboscopic light on the mysteries of life as a couple. Self-deception, vanity, hypocrisy, dreams and hopes, apathy and defeats shape and deform complex relationships that reveal the most hilarious and terrible aspects of gender roles and their social impact.
Bužarovska dissects who we are and who we want to be in a first-person analysis of married life that ventures between the boundaries of parody and tragedy.
Selected by Livres Hebdo as a Must-Read Book of 2022
Recommended by Elke Heidenreich in Der Spiegel
“The Macedonian writer, born in 1981, shatters pretenses with a sense of humor that spares not a single character. With an acid pen, she depicts situations that are pathetic, at times even tragic, to allow laughter to open the way to liberation.” — Le Monde
“This Macedonian writer has a sharp tongue. If the men are stupid and vain, unfaithful and chauvinist, the women are naïve, replete with their own weaknesses. Rumena Bužarovska plays on the blurred, shifting ground of relationships, the slippery moments that give rise to fantasy, or to those, especially uncomfortable, that trigger doubt, regret, and feelings of frustration.” — Lire
“[Her] prose is rhythmic, with a sharp sense of theater and cinematic montage … leaving space for things left unsaid, for semblances, for the materiality of the flesh, for romantic failure, for burlesque.” —Philippe Petit, Marianne
“Bužarovska’s literary strength lies in the weaknesses of her characters . . . whose words are never what they think, whose thoughts are never what they feel . . . [in] an eternal struggle for attention and recognition that is never satisfied nor ever granted to another soul. In the end, both men and women receive their just deserts by reason of their emotional ineptitude and emotional sloppiness. [But] Bužarovska is never cynical, for between the lines she reveals the battles that everyone is forced to wage within themselves.” — Falter
“Carnage, yes, but of the most hilarious variety.” — L’Express
“In the eleven stories that make up My Husband, the institution of marriage is at the center of each petty cruelty, each profound disappointment, each quietly cutting comment and abrasive fight… Bužarovska points out a key, constraining fact with which every woman is intimately familiar: patriarchy breeds cruelty… It makes sense that Bužarovska was largely responsible for pioneering the Macedonian version of the #MeToo hashtag. Who else would be bold enough to take on the institution—the system—of marriage?” — Eva Dunsky, Los Angeles Review
“[A writer of] formidable intelligence, cruelty, and talent for the tragicomic.” — Astrid De Larminat, Le Figaro
“[Her] stories treat the abysmal with defiant comedy.” — Die Welt
“Nobody does it like Bužarovska—her short stories depict the social paralysis of post-transition North Macedonia with precision and simplicity so rarely found in contemporary post-Yugoslav literature. Her characters are stuck inside their own logic—even those who have managed to leave the Balkans physically, are never truly free of its influence. The humor is found in their unawareness of the petty patterns their lives follow, but the author is not a judge here, only a master observer of her own society. This collection is a true literary gem.” — Lana Bastašić, Electric Literature
