Albena Stambolova

A first novel from Bulgaria that I likely would not have read but for the fact that it is published by Open Letter, a press devoted to works in translation from around the world. I didn’t care for the book or its style. Still, the book garnered quite a bit of attention, much of it positive, and I can understand intellectually why it is well-regarded. Of the reviews I read, this one a pithy summary and good analysis:
“The book is a strange and beautiful experiment in marrying fairy tale and naturalism. It begins with a mute boy who communes mainly with computers and bees and ends with the passing of his sister/mother/lover Maria, a witch-figure whose inner workings defy analysis while she’s alive, and whose dead body resists even the interpretive acumen of her pathologist ex-husband, a man whose ‘job consisted of finding causes.’… In between, the novel is populated with characters who flicker between realism and myth….”
Another review is even more laudatory, arguing that
“Stambolova tells sinuous tales that snake through the lives of her characters, leaving the reader feeling privy to those deeply personal moments in which life make perfect emotional sense—even as it makes no cerebral sense at all. With Stambolova’s characters, there are many such moments; she renders them with a deft, radically sympathetic patience that captures their sense of wonder whole. They tend…to simply be wired differently than the rest of us, without the need for external coherence and comprehensibility that civilization pushes us to embrace.”
Maybe. But I found the writing challenging, despite its simplicity, perhaps because so little of it seemed to cohere and the story, as this reviewer noted, wasn’t coherent or readily comprehensible. Conclusion? If any of this piques your interest, I’d encourage you to investigate. I suspect others may enjoy it a good deal. As for me, I think I’ll bypass Stambolova in the future.… (more)