Category: Bulgaria

She who remians by Rene Karabash

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She who remains by Rene Karabash

Bulgarian fiction

Original title – Остайница

Translator – Izidora Angel

Source – personal copy

When the longlist was announced for the Booker International Prize, I was very lucky that I had a number of subscriptions for various publishers, but the first subscription I ever got was for Peirene, the publisher of this mbook a press I have reviewed a lot of books from and one that has brought some extraordinary novellas to the English-speaking world. I had intended to readthis as it isn’t the first book I have read about Sworn virgins I read Sworn Virgins by Elvira Dones twelve years ago she also made a film follow twelve sworn virgins that had left the Balkans this is not just a Albanian traditioon it is followed in other Balkan countries a traditon that has a lot to do with old traditions around inheirtence, family line, blood feuds and like in this book the Kanun a sort of law of the region about this happening and how Women come to live as men.

Matija, Bekija according to my passport, thirty-three years old, yes, one brother, Sále, father, Murash, murdered, mother dead shortly after, there’s only Nura the cow and my father’s pigeons, favourite colour blue, afraid only of snow, the big snow, loneliness is another thing altogether, no, here love is forbidden, love is death, I don’t go to the doctor, I plug up my wounds with tobacco, if anything happens I smoke, television doesn’t exist, I don’t need it, the radio is enough, Albanian songs and occasionally an American one, I can’t sing, no, and I don’t want to, this one here is of me, my father, my brother Sále and my mother, it was taken before, yes, that’s enough for today, Nura is hungry and the pigeons need to be shut in for the night

the violence that surrounds her past

The book follows the life of Bekija, a woman who had an arranged marriage, and the only way she can escape it is via the law of Kanun, which says that because she turned down the marriage, she has to live as a sworn virgin, as a male, so Bekija becomes Matija the firsgt part of the book is the aftermath of `all this in the remote villages they live this has a knock on effect for the whole family with the blood feud it causes. So when later in the book we see letters from the brother and a journalist turns up at the village and wants to interview Matija about why theyn are a sworn virgin and what she has lost of r this at first Matija does’t see this but as the two talk her life unfurls and the past comes to haunt the present and tshe heads off to find the brother that had escaped to Sofia.

Hello, Bekija,

I very much hope this letter reaches you. I know the houses in our village don’t exactly have numbers on them, and I’m aware how impossible corresponding through letters and telegrams can be. I’ve been meaning to write to you for a long time. Every day since 1 ran away… You must understand why I had to do what I did. Why I ran. That I did it because of the enormous, irreparable mistake you made. You do understand it’s completely within the bounds of one’s survival instincts to want to save oneself, right? My leaving was the smartest thing a sane and sober-minded man could do, someone unafflicted with the delirium of the laws of the Kanun. I can’t apologize for it, it is who I am.

The start of the first letter from her brother Sale

 

As i say, I had experience of this not just from the book Sworn virgin I did work alongside a Kosovian Albanian in a factory in Germany many years ago and learnt a little back then of Albanian culture from this chap and his wife she was studying Albanian literature before thy had to escape due to the Balakans conflict so I have always had an interest in the Blakans and rememebr the conversations about the way in the countryside there were still these tradtions that and his love of english football especially Glenn Hoddle.  Anyway, that is enough of my journey down memory lane. It turned out the writer spent two years researching the sworn virgin culture and the Kanun, using Ismail Kadare’s book Broken April, which I have yet to read. But what she wanted to do was capture a female living as a male in a patriarchal society like this one, with its violence,  ancient laws, and blood feuds.  Using Bekija’s Journey as the catalyst for describing this culture.  The book is told in a stream-of-consciousness style, with an episodic narrative, and also includes interviews and letters. It is, as ever, a book that feels much bigger than its parts, which is what Peirene are known for.  Have you read this or any books about the Kanun laws that govern that part of the Balkans? It was a hit for me because it had a number of things that I love in fiction: a village setting, books from the Balkans and books that look at human nature

 

The book against Death by Elias Canetti

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The Book Against Death by Elias Canetti

Bulgarian literature

Original title – Das Buch gegen den Tod

Translator – Peter Filkins

Source – Subscription book

I should have got to Canetti sooner than this. I have Aut de Fe, his best-known novel, on my shelf and his non-fiction writing from his time in the blitz in London. Born in Bulgaria, he spent his first few years in Manchester. His mother then moved him back to central Europe. They eventually settled in Vienna. He spoke many languages and was the perfect example of the Jewish intellect in central Europe in those pre-war years. He escaped and was in London in the war. He wrote in German he started this book in the war years. A book that has years of him raging against death was abridged from over 20000 pages of notes he had on the subject and other thoughts he had collected together with the idea of the book against death. This came out after his death and was distilled to a few hundred pages.

15 June 1942

Five years ago today my mother died. Since then my world has turned inside out. To me it is as if it happened just yesterday. Have I really lived five years, and she knows nothing of it? I want to undo each screw of her coffin’s lid with my lips and haul her out. I know that she is dead. I know that she has rotted away. But I can never accept it as true. I want to bring her to life again. Where do I find parts of her? Mostly in my brothers and me. But that is not enough. I need to find every person whom she knew. I need to retrieve every word she ever said. I need to walk in her steps and smell the flowers she smelled, the great-grandchild of every blossom that she held up to her powerful nostrils. I need to piece back together the mirrors that once reflected her image. I want to know every syllable she could have possibly said in any language.

Where is her shadow? Where is her fury? I will loan her my breath. She should walk on my own two legs.

I fear living historians. If they’re dead, I read them gladly.

I ;loved the last line about historians

He talks early on in the book about how the book came to him five years after his mother’s death. He seemed to have lost both his parents when he was at a young age. In addition to the war, it is easy to see why young Elias raged so much against death. He deals with death from mass deaths he mentions Saddam Hussein a lot in this regard. Then, To The Death of Saints, which discusses how writers have tackled death, is a book that goes from here to there. What comes across is a humanist view of the battle against death and how he tackled it in his life. He talks about a fellow writer I love, Thomas Bernhard, and yes, he likes him as a writer, but isn’t he obsessed with death? This is a man wandering in his thoughts, getting snippets of his fellow writers as he tries to learn what dearth is by raging against it. He is very much the character Dylan Thomas had in mind when he said rage against the night!

Everyone asks me about Thomas Bernhard, everyone wants to know what I think of him. I praise him and explain what he’s about, I try to help others better understand him. I elevate him to my disciple, and naturally he is, and in a much deeper sense than someone like Iris Murdoch, who is always so pleasant and light, while underneath it all she has become a brilliant and amusing popular writer. She is not really a disciple of mine, because she is so obsessed with gender. However, Thomas Bernhard is obsessed with death.

On the other hand, in recent years he has come under the influence of another, which conceals my own, namely that of Beckett. Bernhard’s hypochondria makes him susceptible to Beckett. Like him he gives in to death, rather than opposing it. He sees it everywhere and passively damns all to it.

Therefore I think that now, because of his empowerment through Beckett, Bernhard is somewhat overrated, but overrated by the higher-ups: the Germans have found their own Beckett in him.

The entanglement of my influence on Bernhard with that of Beckett is curious and obvious. It’s a little too simple to really please me. So, I declare here, for myself, that I have defended him too much out of generosity. I am not entirely sure if it serves him.

His thought around Thomas Bernhard

I know that post-war, he struggled to write another novel. One wonders if all this collection and raging against dearth was his way of dealing with the horror of the war years and the wiping out of his central European Jewish world. This is maybe his momento mori. He never quite finished. Part of me would happily love to have seen the total 2000 pages that made up his vision of the project even if he never got to thin it down I imagine there are some real gems to be uncovered from one of Europe’s leading thinkers of the time. I hope to get Auto de Fe read next year. I like this. I had hoped for something, maybe a little more digression and drifting, as this is collected in the years from 1942 until his death. One wonders how he would collect them if he had got around to it? But this is an exciting view of one man’s fifty-year struggle to deal with death. Have you a favourite book about death?

 

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

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Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

Bulgarian Fiction

Original title – Времеубежище,

Translator – Angela Rodel

Source – Personal copy

I am still in Eastern Europe. I have moved from Hungary to one of the leaders of Bulgarian writing, and his latest book to be translated into English is Time shelter. Georgi Gospodinov had several books already translated into English, one from Dalkey, another from a university press and one by Open Letter, which I do have somewhere to read. He has won several book prizes and has been on the shortlist of prizes like the Italian Stega prize. He was also a writer in Residence in Zurich a fact he mentions in the afterword of this book.

The next day I was at Heliosstrasse first thing in the morning, Mr. S. had given me the address. I found the apricot-colored building on the western shore of the lake, separated from the other houses on the hill. It was massive yet light at the same time, four stories with a fifth attic floor, a large shared terrace on the second level, and smaller balconies on the other floors. All the windows looked to the southwest, which made the afternoons endless, and the day’s final bluish glimmers nested in them until the very last moment, while the light blue wooden shutters contrasted softly with the pale apricot of the facade.

There is some wonderfully descriptive passages in the book

Like many books from Eastern Europe, it is a retrospective of those communist years, but that also makes it a prism of the present. The framing device for all this is the activity of an assistant for a Therapist called Gaustin. He has a radical treatment that involves rebuilding exact replicas of people’s past for when they have dementia. It is the assistant’s job to go out. He finds the past in the present and rebuilds the individual’s past. As he collects those small trinkets we remember from the red typewriter ( a memory I saw and mentioned how I’d loved the same typewriter back in the day) But is the problem is the past when for you, the past is as a  Holocaust survivor worth reliving ? His clinic grows, and as it does Gaustine’s ideas are more grandiose. They start to think of making countries into individual decades. This would be when that country had a particular peak or significant period of history. The problem is living in the past and what that effect has is it dangerous to dwell on or relive those moments. As the clinic has grown more people, haven’t dementia but just want to grasp their own past.

All elections up until this point had been about the future. This would be different.

TOTAL RECALL: EUROPE CHOOSES ITS PAST.

EUROPE-THE NEW UTOPIA … EUROTOPIA.

A EUROPEAN UNION OF THE COMMON PAST.

Those were the headlines in European newspapers. If nothing else, Europe was good at utopias. Yes, the Continent had been mined with a past that divided it, two world wars, hundreds of oth ers, Balkan Wars, Thirty-Year Wars, Hundred-Year Wars… But there were also enough memories of alliances, of living as neighbors, memories of empires that gathered together supposedly ungatherable groups for centuries on end. People didn’t stop to think tha in and of itself, the nation was a bawling historicalinfant masquerading as a biblical patriarch.

Maybe the past is a recurring events and

This book looks at those post-war years but also the present. It is an attack on nostalgia why it can be dangerous. In a way, why do we want to live in the past? Is it healthy at times, yes? But for others, it is a danger to relive those years. This is the book for me it has a bit of Sebald that memorialises the past of objects, especially in a book like the rings of Saturn? Then he has a chunk of Nadas as a writer I think how Wonderfully and darkly, at times, he captures his own past and Hungarian history and the brutal nature of that past. Then I was reminded of Topol’s book Devil’s workshop, which is a book that tackles how we deal with or sell the past this case, how we use the Naszi death camps. It isn’t as entertaining park as imagined in that book. It deals with how we use the past in a way as entertainment or history or is it a warning ?. This book’s title in Bulgarian is more of a term that suggests hiding in time like a bomb shelter. Have seen since the fall of communism, some countries and people have had a sort of nostalgic view of the past and the dangers of viewing it with rose colour spectacles. There have been several films around this nostalgia. Have you read any of his books or any other Bulgarian fiction?

Winston’s score – +A great book and a writer I will be watching for his next book!!

Mission London by Alek Popov

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missioon London Cover Alek Popov

Mission London by Alek Popov

Bulgarian Fiction

Original title –  Мисия Лондон

Translators – Daniella and Charles Gill de Mayol de Lupe

Source – Review copy

Why, why, why? Because it’s all logic and reason now! Science, progress, chip-chip… Laws of hydraulics, laws of social dynamics, laws of this, that and the other… No place for three legged Cyclops in the South Seas… no place for cucumber trees and oceans of vine… no place for me!

From Quote NET baron Munchausen

Susan at Istros books is doing a great job bring wonderful new books from the Balkans and surrounding regions ,here she has brought us Alek Popov a rising star of Bulgarian fiction ,Alek Popov he got a degree in Bulrgrian Philology from Sofia university , he has worked as an editor ,also as cultural attaché to the Bulgarian embassy in London for a time .He has written 11 novels and was elected to the Bulgarian academy in 2012 for creative arts .Mission London is his first novel to be translated to English and is also a successful film .

“Your Excellency !” Robert Ziebling exclaimed , from the very threshold of this office .”I cannot begin to express how delighted I was to receive this invitation ”

The managing director of famous connections seized the Ambassador’s hands and proceeded to shake it fiercely .

The dodgy Pr man meets Varadin

So Mission London follows the new Ambassador at the Bulgarian embassy , this guy  Varadin has been thrust from nowhere really to this prestigious job as a stepping stone for a bigger political career   .Now the problem is he has some hard tasks to try to do for his bosses back home ,The wife of the current prime minister wants to meet the queen for a banquet .This leads him to a dodgy pr firm ,he meets a Princess Diana double  Katya ,whom he employs first as a cleaner then when he discovers she is the Diana double things take quite a strange twist for her and Varadin .Then there is the hunt for food for the meal ,the chef he wants swans but through a Russian Mafia connection ends up with ducks stolen from the royal park that the police can track .Add to this the keeper of the ducks ,Russian Mafia bosses and a fake queen .A story that will have you laughing and cringing at Varadin’s  life in London .

Dale pulled out his mobile and called Ray Solo head of security

“Ray ” he said weakly ,”I’ve cause to believe something terrible has happened …”

“Whats wrong ?” Ray’s voice sound stressed .

“My ducks have disappeared ” sobbed Dale “My little duclings !”

The ducks are stolen from the Royal Richmond Pond to go in the ovens at the Embassy .

Now I loved this one it was a book I started put to one side and then Last weekend decide to start again and read it in a couple of sittings especially after watching the trailer for the film .As you see in the trailer the book is rather like A Bulgarian take on a guy richie film ,multiple plot-lines ,bending the real world just enough that it is absurd but believable .It also is a remind of the Humour in Bulgarian lit  ,I have come across before in the other book from Bulgaria I have reviewed here circus Bulgaria by Deyan Enev , a dark mix of satire and black humour that is similar in this book .If you like the greats of British Political satire television you will love this book it is one of those books that every turn sees another disaster around the corner another near miss  .Another gem from Istros books .here is the trailer for the film .

Have you a favourite Bulgarian read ?

Lion for sale ?

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TITLE – Circus Bulgaria by Deyan Enev

SOURCE  – REVIEW COPY SENT AFTER REQUEST

Deyan Enev is one of a new wave of Bulgarian writers to emerge ,HE was born in Sofia ,married and has had a number of interesting jobs painter ,night nurse ,school teacher and Journalist .He has won Bulgaria’s premier literary prize .I first heard him Talk about Circus Bulgaria on the world service radio and was grab by the man and his book so ask for a review copy .The book centres mainly on people living in and around Bulgaria’s capital Sofia .The book is what may be called a collection of flash fiction pieces ranging from a couple of pages to some over ten pages .as you jump in and out of these lives you find a group of people struggling in the hard times post communism in .they range from gypsy to circus people to little boys .we meet a lion tamer forced to sell his lion to some villains ,A fighter turned hit man .and a personal favourite that made me laugh for a number of days after I read the book ,a man finds a boy wander in the grass in  the night ,ask him what he is doing hunting hedgehogs a discussion follows on the reason for hunting hedgehogs very surreal and funny .

Hi, Krum said , and managed to light a cigarette .he drew on it and tried to look casual .

hi ,the boy said .can you keep quiet ,please ?

why ? krum had already forgotten about being casual .

I ‘m hunting for hedgehogs the boy explained .on a full moon ,there are always lots of hedgehogs .I had a hedgehog at home once .He was character .he kept poking his snout in the kitchen .but you know ,it’s a lie what they say about hedgehogs that they can dance to music .

Krum finds a boy hunting hedgehogs from ,from the life of hedgehogs

The book remind me in parts of Raymond Carver’s short stories ,the characters are similar they like a drink like many of Carvers characters and also are on the fringes of society like carvers tended to be ,there is also a wonderfully surreal edge to some of them bizarre accounts and weird people .It conjures up a melting pot of a city in Sofia .If this is the first of a wave of Bulgarian writing I look forward to the others ,Deyan Enev is a fresh new voice to these shores and a welcome one ,this has to be one of the most stunning debuts I ve ever read .The book is translated by Kapka Kassbova.

WINSTON’S SCORE

 Well I ve found it hard to find an image to Fit this book but this sentence may sum it up .If Robert Altman’s short cuts had been moved to eastern Europe and scripted by the team behind League of gentlemen !