Memoirs of the new kid on the bloc

Published on Saturday 19 July 2008 13:46

BOOK review

STREET WITHOUT A NAME: CHILDHOOD AND OTHER MISADVENTURES IN BULGARIA

Kapka Kassabova

Portobello, 15.99

THIS memoir of life in Communist Bulgaria during the 1980s is really a book of two halves. In the first, Kassabova recalls her childhood in Sofia and the sobering events that led to her later comparing her past to a bothersome and unsettled feeling, much "like an infirm relative calling out from a darkened room at the back of the house".

This quirky way of viewing events sets the tone for much of the book and saves it from being a worthy tale of political and social oppression, turning it instead into a memorable piece of acutely observed writing where events are relayed with a novelist's eye. Kassabova ably brings to life her difficult childhood spent in an intellectual family where education was everything, because "to have special privileges, money and status you had to be a big-shot factory director".

There is little food to be had in Sofia and Bulgaria itself possesses the most hideous public toilets ever known to man, so much so that "you didn't eat, you didn't drink, you didn't go until such a time as a home toilet became available". Her beloved ancestors are portrayed as romantic, unsettled, crazy sorts of people, one grandmother in particular described as "a summer thunderstorm in a dark winter of the soul".

Kassabova's first encounter with life outside impoverished Sofia comes at the age of nine with a trip to Macedonia where people looked similar but ate "chocolates with hazelnuts and peaches without down".

By the time the summer of Chernobyl occurs, the author is "desperately clinging to something slippery which was drifting away. In retrospect it was childhood."

Struck down by a mystery virus, Kassabova finds herself in a hospital with no food and a room with bars at the window from which she is forced to stare out at a "squat, impersonal monolith called Russian Monument and, next to it, a faceless high-rise called Hotel Motherland".

With her typical insistence on trying to make the best of a grim situation, the author continues the tale with "meanwhile, life in the 2nd Regional Children's Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases wasn't all gloom and doom".

This is only one sample of the humour that lifts this memoir above run-of-the-mill into something more endearing and enduring. After several more years of almost unbearable existence in Sofia, a sudden escape route arrives. Her father is offered a fellowship in Colchester and Kassabova is thrust into a world where boyfriends mope around listening to the Smiths and virginity begs to be taken, only to find that the family's visas have expired and they must go back again to Bulgaria.

Here life is unspeakably grim and wholly comprises queuing for hours, if not days, with coupons for bread. Kassabova's mother vanishes at one point for 35 hours, returning with a tank of petrol.

The second half of Kassabova's memoir works less well, although her evocative portrayal of a country much changed is still well worth the read. Perhaps it is because now her tale is up to date; she has survived life in Sofia and lived in other countries before becoming compelled to revisit post-Communist Bulgaria and lay some childhood ghosts to rest.

Or it may be that her descriptions of the return adult visit made via detours to remote inns, monasteries and tiny hotels across the landscape seem more like travel writing, lacking the poignancy and personal quality of that recalled childhood.

Her attention to the tiny details of her surroundings, though, never falters ("a bearded goat that looks like a Biblical old man, possibly Moses, is watching me critically from a small rubbish mound"). This book, with its sharply humorous details of close family life and the evocative and sometimes almost spiritual portrayal of an era lost and a country changed forever, recalls the writings of Isabel Allende. Kassabova has a similar gift for measured, eloquent, no-frills storytelling, although, like Allende, she colours her prose with dazzling similes: "I walked over the hot dark cracks in the tar-sealed promenade, flowering like cracked chocolate cake in the oven of summer."

She seems to have survived her grim start in Sofia remarkably unscathed, despite admitting that her portrait of Bulgaria is "always personal and almost never flattering". It is these two qualities, of course, which ensure that Street Without A Name makes for such a highly enjoyable read. v