Critical reception welcomed Lidija Dimkovska's novel A Spare Life (2012) as an allegory of political and social events in ex-Yugoslavia in the last decades of the twentieth century. The essay sets aside the allegorical perspective of the novel and focuses on the analysis of the state of exile as a key point of identification of the novel's main character, conjoined twin Zlata. The analysis is based on the concepts of desire, otherness and fear of the unknown through which main characters (mostly women) of the novel are represented, as well as on manners of their internalization of socially promoted standards and stereotypes from the perspective of Julia Kristeva's theory of oneself as a stranger. © 2018 Croatian Philosophical Society. All rights reserved.

Exile Identity A spare life Stranger Lidija Dimkovska Otherness

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