A well-wrought memoir about growing up in Bulgaria during the
dreary Communist years.Nestled between Romania, Turkey and
Macedonia on the Black Sea, Bulgaria is a country that Westerners
know little about, likely due to its long closure from the Western
world and the Slavic language barrier. Kassabova (The Best of
Delhi, 2008, etc.), who spent expat years in New Zealand and
Scotland, opens this history-rich country to readers. The author
was raised in Sofia with her parents, both intellectuals, and
younger sister in a "two-room flat in an eight-floor concrete
building surrounded by thousands of identical concrete buildings,
purposeful and sturdy like nuclear plants in freshly bulldozed
fields of mud." Their building was called "Youth 3" (after Youth 1
and 2), and as a child Kassabova suspected that something was wrong
with their meager, joyless world: " 'Mum, why is everything so
ugly?' To which my mother couldn't find an honest answer, except to
hide her tears." At one point, the author suffered from a
mysterious auto-immune disease probably resulting from the
Chernobyl fallout. Some of her father's colleagues from Holland,
arriving in an extravagant van wearing bright, pastel clothing and
eating unimaginable treats, reinforced the family's shame and the
sense that they were not equal. Education offered only "an
inhabitable space in the uninhabitable Youths" and "the possibility
to emigrate 'internally.' " After the collapse of the Berlin Wall,
when the author was 16, she and her parents were finally allowed to
emigrate. Kassabova's work encompasses both her early years and her
return trips to Sofia and other areas of Bulgaria, during which she
visited relatives, trekked the Balkan mountains and explored Balkan
history and ancient myths (Orpheus was born in the Rhodope
mountains). 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)
Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and grew up under the drab,
muddy, grey mantle of one of communism s most mindlessly
authoritarian regimes. Escaping with her family as soon as possible
after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she lived in Britain, New
Zealand, and Argentina, and several other places. But when Bulgaria
was formally inducted to the European Union she decided it was time
to return to the home she had spent most of her life trying to
escape. What she found was a country languishing under the strain
of transition. This two-part memoir of Kapka s childhood and return
explains life on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
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