A three-and-a-half star work, and the first Bulgarian author that I've been aware of reading. 21 stories in 96 pages, and none longer than 7 pages, yet it still took me a week to finish — strange, that. Perhaps it could be said that, despite their short nature, the stories merit only dipping into them, rather than attempting to devour them in one go.

It opens with "Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots", a wonderfully melancholy piece, and probably the best one in the volume. The rest are a mixed bag: a few other excellent ones, many good ones, and a few ones that should have been left, as they say with regards to film, on the cutting-room floor. The majority of these latter ones feel, indeed, like the pieces of some larger, incomplete whole. They tended to be the shortest of the lot, frequently only a single page, and never fully evoked a mood nor illustrated any sort of deeper concept with which to provoke thought. Fragmentary— like an anecdote some friend tells as part of a larger story, a snippet of overheard conversation, or this sentence.

A decent work, but one that would have been made stronger by a bit of trimming. (But in that case, then the already thin volume may have been too thin to justify publication.) ( )

A collection from a contemporary Bulgarian author. 21 stories on 96 pages - and they cannot be more different from each other than this. Some of the stories are almost brilliant (especially most of the ones concerning trains) but some left me wondering what's the point - it sounded almost as if the author was trying way too hard instead of simply telling his story. And the few very short pieces do not work at all - they are more impressions than proper stories but instead of building them around the picture they represehttp://static.librarything.com/pics/s-s.gifnt, Gospodinov is trying to build a story instead. Add to this a few stories that are nothing more than a standard anecdote turned into a story and the whole impression gets scattered.

But at the same time the books has its gems - some of them from the lyrical type, some of them from the actual Bulgarian life (for example the one dealing with the cemetery made me remember the cemetery in my parents' village and the one at the airport made me remember way too many departures (even if the end was a bit strange)).

3 and a half stars out of 5 for the book and if some of the stories were not there, that would have been a much better collection. ( )