BULGARIA AND I
In 2003 I set out to write a novel, initially under the working title Bulgaria but which later became Nostalgia for Darkness an unfinished and possibly un-finishable work. Re-reading the introduction it now feels grandiose and inflated.
'What follows represents an attempt to tell the truth; that most difficult, most improbable, of all tasks. However there are a few things I need to clarify. Call these the facts if you like. Firstly I do not intend to write about Bulgaria, this adventure is set in Bulgaria, but it is not the Bulgaria, it is an inner Bulgaria, a Bulgaria, if you will, of the heart. If you try to seek out this country, you will not find it.
However my reticence represented an understandable reaction to the audacity of attempting to write about Bulgaria and to not wanting to appear either naive or to be seeing the country through the rose tinted glasses of the tourist. This left me with the problem of seeking to explain my love of Bulgaria, my sense of excitement when landing in Sofia, Varna, or Bourgas, a love affair that throbbed vibrantly, whether sitting in the café outside the elegant Theatre Ivan Vazov in Sofia or in some dusty side street in Tsaravo, for its not as if I were blind to the faults and flaws of this complex country, how then to explain my homesickness for this Balkan state on the edge of Europe; a homesickness I felt then and feel even more strongly now? So as I struggled to find the truth of this aching unrequited love, struggled to pin down the roots of this feeling, the greater the sense I had of writing fiction, until I realised it is indeed the fiction that represents the greater truth.
Now I am reading ‘Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria,’ by Kapka Kassabova,* someone who does have the authority to write about Bulgaria. I came across the book a couple of years back in Foyles bookshop, but flicking through it found passages so critical of my beloved Bulgaria that I found the read too painful and put the book back.
The book now sits beside my bed, once commenced impossible to put down, like all good books reading me as much as I read it. It is however still a painful read, not now because of its sharp criticisms of the the land of her birth, for Kassabova has earned the right to those criticisms many times over, having experienced things beyond my comprehension.. But for me impossible to put to one side as a consequence of the overwhelming sense of sadness that pervades the book, a sadness I always felt whilst living in Bulgaria and which I now understand more fully. The weight of suffering presses down on this small country like a suffocating compress. I sometimes saw it in the eyes of Z** the beautiful woman whom I loved and with whom I lived, when she talked about the steady closures of the schools as the birth rate sunk and of the exodus of Bulgaria’s young people.
Of course in Bulgaria I could be an Englishman, an Englishman abroad, though hopefully not of a kind you never found in the mass tourist resorts of Sunny Beach and Golden Sands, nor amongst the swarms of the new property owning ex pats who have descended upon places such as Velika Turnovo, the ancient capital of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom, like a plague. I loathed these loud mouthed Englishmen and women with their patronising attitudes and grotesque self importance, weekend millionaires with all the sensitivity of a xenophobic pub bore. Their presence in numbers in Veleka Turnovo led to a grotesque misunderstanding between Z and I, for when I sought to avoid these hideous people she thought me ashamed of being seen with her, a beautiful articulate woman! Such misunderstandings seemed to abound,# born of of an insecurity and inferiority complex that seems to be hard wired into the Bulgarian psyche.
Later back in Slaviekov## I was happy again to be the only Englishman on the block and Z guesses at darker secrets, that perhaps I too take too much pleasure in my relative affluence here, wallow in the novelty of my Englishness, that all these English week end millionaires are all a bit to close for comfort, and I feel ashamed.
Though I must say in my own defence that my love for Bulgaria could never be reduced to such an ugly formula The thrill of arriving in Sofia or Bourgas, drinking cold beer outside the Ivan Vazov theatre, watching the sun set with Z over Nessebar or setting the sea alight in Primorsko, or watching that same sun to set gloriously over Sofia as I wound my way eastwards with my friend Bobby, the sea and the whole of summer before me. A love though not solely confined to the dramatic, equally at home in the little café in Slaviekov, a love imbued with the overwhelming feeling of homecoming.
So why do some people become passionate anglophiles, or fall in love with Uganda or Malawi, discover a spiritual home in Russia or Japan? Perhaps like falling in love with a person a certain degree of projection is involved, we project onto these bewildered cultures something of ourselves or our own needs. Certainly this was the conclusion I reached when writing Nostalgia for Darkness and it certainly feels true that some aspect of my wounded psyche feels capable of healing in Bulgaria in a way that never felt possible in England.
I have now finished reading Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria. I did not find reading it so difficult, but I did find the sudden surges of homesickness difficult to ride. The story it tells is of a wounded country, never given time to heal as it is swept along by the currents of history. A country in which evil has been insolent and strong, imbeciles in high office and people of sense excluded; a country nearly bled white by autocratic buffoons and gangsters, but despite it all whose people remain resiliently determined to survive. So I pay homage to Bulgaria both the real and imagined country.
*Portobello Books
** I take Christopher Hitchens line that it is fine to be cavalier with my own biographical details but do not have permission to be so free with the lives with whom I have been so close.
#Language too was an area beset with complications, which coupled with the nuances of culture could lead to a whole myriad of misunderstandings. This was not helped by my pathetic inability to master even the most basic Bulgarian beyond a few necessary words. Though language could also be an area of great charm, the mixture of English and Bulgarian, the jumbling of phrases and tense could lead to great poetry, a private language.
## A suburb of Bourgas
'What follows represents an attempt to tell the truth; that most difficult, most improbable, of all tasks. However there are a few things I need to clarify. Call these the facts if you like. Firstly I do not intend to write about Bulgaria, this adventure is set in Bulgaria, but it is not the Bulgaria, it is an inner Bulgaria, a Bulgaria, if you will, of the heart. If you try to seek out this country, you will not find it.
Secondly the people, about whom I write, including of course my self, all exist or have existed, which, given that these are my reflections alone, is to say they are all essentially fictional. The events I describe all happened; which, given that they are my memories of things now passed are therefore all fundamentally invented. And so I have created a story about a work in progress. Put another way my life and the things of which I wish to speak, have always been and will continue to represent, a work of fiction.'
However my reticence represented an understandable reaction to the audacity of attempting to write about Bulgaria and to not wanting to appear either naive or to be seeing the country through the rose tinted glasses of the tourist. This left me with the problem of seeking to explain my love of Bulgaria, my sense of excitement when landing in Sofia, Varna, or Bourgas, a love affair that throbbed vibrantly, whether sitting in the café outside the elegant Theatre Ivan Vazov in Sofia or in some dusty side street in Tsaravo, for its not as if I were blind to the faults and flaws of this complex country, how then to explain my homesickness for this Balkan state on the edge of Europe; a homesickness I felt then and feel even more strongly now? So as I struggled to find the truth of this aching unrequited love, struggled to pin down the roots of this feeling, the greater the sense I had of writing fiction, until I realised it is indeed the fiction that represents the greater truth.
Now I am reading ‘Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria,’ by Kapka Kassabova,* someone who does have the authority to write about Bulgaria. I came across the book a couple of years back in Foyles bookshop, but flicking through it found passages so critical of my beloved Bulgaria that I found the read too painful and put the book back.
The book now sits beside my bed, once commenced impossible to put down, like all good books reading me as much as I read it. It is however still a painful read, not now because of its sharp criticisms of the the land of her birth, for Kassabova has earned the right to those criticisms many times over, having experienced things beyond my comprehension.. But for me impossible to put to one side as a consequence of the overwhelming sense of sadness that pervades the book, a sadness I always felt whilst living in Bulgaria and which I now understand more fully. The weight of suffering presses down on this small country like a suffocating compress. I sometimes saw it in the eyes of Z** the beautiful woman whom I loved and with whom I lived, when she talked about the steady closures of the schools as the birth rate sunk and of the exodus of Bulgaria’s young people.
Of course in Bulgaria I could be an Englishman, an Englishman abroad, though hopefully not of a kind you never found in the mass tourist resorts of Sunny Beach and Golden Sands, nor amongst the swarms of the new property owning ex pats who have descended upon places such as Velika Turnovo, the ancient capital of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom, like a plague. I loathed these loud mouthed Englishmen and women with their patronising attitudes and grotesque self importance, weekend millionaires with all the sensitivity of a xenophobic pub bore. Their presence in numbers in Veleka Turnovo led to a grotesque misunderstanding between Z and I, for when I sought to avoid these hideous people she thought me ashamed of being seen with her, a beautiful articulate woman! Such misunderstandings seemed to abound,# born of of an insecurity and inferiority complex that seems to be hard wired into the Bulgarian psyche.
Later back in Slaviekov## I was happy again to be the only Englishman on the block and Z guesses at darker secrets, that perhaps I too take too much pleasure in my relative affluence here, wallow in the novelty of my Englishness, that all these English week end millionaires are all a bit to close for comfort, and I feel ashamed.
Though I must say in my own defence that my love for Bulgaria could never be reduced to such an ugly formula The thrill of arriving in Sofia or Bourgas, drinking cold beer outside the Ivan Vazov theatre, watching the sun set with Z over Nessebar or setting the sea alight in Primorsko, or watching that same sun to set gloriously over Sofia as I wound my way eastwards with my friend Bobby, the sea and the whole of summer before me. A love though not solely confined to the dramatic, equally at home in the little café in Slaviekov, a love imbued with the overwhelming feeling of homecoming.
So why do some people become passionate anglophiles, or fall in love with Uganda or Malawi, discover a spiritual home in Russia or Japan? Perhaps like falling in love with a person a certain degree of projection is involved, we project onto these bewildered cultures something of ourselves or our own needs. Certainly this was the conclusion I reached when writing Nostalgia for Darkness and it certainly feels true that some aspect of my wounded psyche feels capable of healing in Bulgaria in a way that never felt possible in England.
I have now finished reading Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria. I did not find reading it so difficult, but I did find the sudden surges of homesickness difficult to ride. The story it tells is of a wounded country, never given time to heal as it is swept along by the currents of history. A country in which evil has been insolent and strong, imbeciles in high office and people of sense excluded; a country nearly bled white by autocratic buffoons and gangsters, but despite it all whose people remain resiliently determined to survive. So I pay homage to Bulgaria both the real and imagined country.
*Portobello Books
** I take Christopher Hitchens line that it is fine to be cavalier with my own biographical details but do not have permission to be so free with the lives with whom I have been so close.
#Language too was an area beset with complications, which coupled with the nuances of culture could lead to a whole myriad of misunderstandings. This was not helped by my pathetic inability to master even the most basic Bulgarian beyond a few necessary words. Though language could also be an area of great charm, the mixture of English and Bulgarian, the jumbling of phrases and tense could lead to great poetry, a private language.
## A suburb of Bourgas
