Kapka Kassabova’s bittersweet account of growing up in Communist Bulgaria is no sentimental journey, yet it still manages to be poignant, funny and achingly nostalgic.
Raised on a grim high-rise estate in Sofia, Kassabova recalls the Orwellian bureaucracy and petty cruelty of living in a Socialist dystopia, with more stoical wit than regret. Now based in Edinburgh, she left Bulgaria in 1990.
The chronicle, prompted by visits to her newly capitalist homeland, is part-personal diary, part-travelogue and part-history lesson.
Between fond memories of teenage crushes and doting grandparents, Kassabova sifts through Bulgaria’s bloody past, throwing in droll asides about the Yane Sandanski, the “Balkan Che Guevara”, Baba Tonka, the revolutionary matriarch and Georgi Dimitrov, the Stalinist “Great Leader”. Contemporary Bulgaria does not escape her love-hate gaze either, from the Serbian gangsters gunning each other down in Sofia to the village girls trafficked to Germany as prostitutes.
As she traverses modern-day Bulgaria, musing on centuries of ethnic conflict, Kassabova closes with a meditation on nationality, exile and diaspora. Torn between cultures, the author summarises the sensation as being “like wearing different suits, all of them the wrong size, all of them slightly ridiculous”. Charming and disarming, this lovely book effortlessly straddles the border between Balkan fatalism and Borat-style humour.
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