But even as the characters wrestle with the weight of history, the debt to family, and the pangs of exile, the stories themselves are light and deft, animated by Penkov's unmatched eye for the absurd. In East of the West Penkov writes with great empathy about 800 years of tumult in troubled Eastern Europe his characters mourn the way things were and long for things that will never be. These are some of the strange, unexpectedly moving events in talented newcomer Miroslav Penkov's vision of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up his extraordinary debut collection.
A boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) once every five years in the waters of the river that divides their village into East and West. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an orthodox church. While our love.I am her husband, she is my wife.A brilliant debut from a rising talent praised by Salman Rushdie, among others.Ī grandson tries to buy the corpse of Lenin on eBay for his Communist grandfather. Their love was foolish, childish, sugar-sweet, the kind of love that, if you are lucky to lose it, flares up like a thatched roof but burns as long as you live. She learned each letter by heart, and with the months her hatred thinned, and in the end his death turned their love ideal, doomed not to die. But then one morning, almost a year after his death, the postman brought a package with foreign stamps. He'd put some strange ideals, brotherhood and freedom, before his love for her. I know that much without yet having read the end.
And then, with their love peaking, he was killed. She wouldn't keep his diary for so many years otherwise. Most likely, they made plans together, imagined a little house, a pair of children. “Of course she loved the komita more - he must have been her sweetheart, her first big love.
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