After years on the outside, Bulgaria has finally made it into the EU club, but beyond the clichés about undrinkable plonk, cheap property, and assassins with poison-tipped umbrellas, the country remains a largely unknown quantity. Born on the muddy outskirts of Sofia, Kapka Kassabova grew up under Communism, got away just as soon as she could, and has loved and hated her homeland in equal measure ever since. In this illuminating and entertaining memoir, Kapka revisits Bulgaria and her own muddled relationship to it, travelling back to the scenes of her childhood, sampling its bizarre tourist sites, uncovering its centuries' old history of bloodshed and blurred borders, and capturing the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of her own and her country's past.
A well-wrought memoir about growing up in Bulgaria during the dreary Communist years.... As both an insider and outsider, the author is able to assess her complex country with a simultaneously fond and critical gaze. Delves deeply into memory, history and imagination. (Kirkus Reviews)
Description:
After years on the outside, Bulgaria has finally made it into the EU club, but beyond the clichés about undrinkable plonk, cheap property, and assassins with poison-tipped umbrellas, the country remains a largely unknown quantity. Born on the muddy outskirts of Sofia, Kapka Kassabova grew up under Communism, got away just as soon as she could, and has loved and hated her homeland in equal measure ever since. In this illuminating and entertaining memoir, Kapka revisits Bulgaria and her own muddled relationship to it, travelling back to the scenes of her childhood, sampling its bizarre tourist sites, uncovering its centuries' old history of bloodshed and blurred borders, and capturing the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of her own and her country's past.
From Publishers Weekly
Novelist, poet and travel writer Kassabova takes a meandering, bittersweet journey through her native Bulgaria, where she grew up in the last decade and a half of the Cold War. Her chilling, panoramic view of life under Communism is perhaps best caught in her memory of the "rumored disaster at Chernobyl," vehemently denied by the Bulgarian government; just as nuclear rain began t fall, the citizens were forced into the streets for a mandatory May Day celebration that left many to fall sick and die within the year. Kassabova's personal history, like her country's, is full of complex characters and overwhelming challenges; one of her grandfathers, she realized later, was a homosexual struggling in a country that forbade it, and Kassabova herself developed teenage anorexia: "If you can't do anything to the world around you, you do it to yourself." Written following her return visit as a 34-year-old "global soul," Kassabova finds the country she left at 17 still devastated, but with a new measure of hope. Kassabova's tendency to travel two or three decades in a single paragraph can make her a challenge to follow, and she too often gets lost in day-to-day minutia; though engaging and illuminating as is, a more rigorous edit could have made this memoir a page turner.
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Review
A well-wrought memoir about growing up in Bulgaria during the dreary Communist years.... As both an insider and outsider, the author is able to assess her complex country with a simultaneously fond and critical gaze. Delves deeply into memory, history and imagination. (Kirkus Reviews)