A Short Tale of Shame
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- 8,99 €
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- 8,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
CO-WINNER OF THE 2012 CONTEMPORARY BULGARIAN WRITERS CONTEST
After deciding to take a semester off their studies to think about future plans, long-time friends Maya, Sirma, and Spartacus decide to hitchhike to the sea. Boril Krustev, former rock star and middle-aged widower who is driving aimlessly to outrun his grief, picks them up and accompanies them on their journey. It doesn't take them long to figure out they're connected to each other by more than their need to travel—specifically through Boril's daughter, whose actions damaged each of the characters in this novel.
Co-winner of the Contemporary Bulgarian Writers Contest, A Short Tale of Shame marks the arrival of a new talent in Bulgarian literature with a novel about the need to come to terms with the shame and guilt we all harbor.
Angel Igov is a Bulgarian writer, literary critic, and translator. He has published two collections of short stories, the first of which won the Southern Spring award for debut fiction. Igov has also translated books by Paul Auster, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, and Ian McEwan into Bulgarian.
Angela Rodel earned an M.A. in linguistics from UCLA and received a Fulbright Fellowship to study and learn Bulgarian. In 2010 she won a PEN Translation Fund Grant for Georgi Tenev's short story collection. She is one of the most prolific translators of Bulgarian literature working today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like the best of Continental literature, Igov's short and haunting novel manages to be about everything and nothing at once. The novel relays, with fever-dream-realism, the events after Boril Krustev, a grieving widower, and aging ex-rocker, on a whim, picks up a trio of twenty-somethings; Maya, Spartacus, and Sirma on leave from University to re-appraise their future. He hitchhikes along the highway, and travels with them along a mythic coast of an unnamed Balkin state, fraught with allegorical ethnic division. From this skeleton of a plot, Igov inhabits the consciousness of each character, moves backwards and forwards from the past to the present, and explores with affection the trials of middle-age and the melancholy of youth; from the blossoming of friendship, to the death of a spouse, from first love to infidelity; the fulcrum of the novel being Krustev's daughter, Elena, whose presence and absence animates this tale like Godot. With a radiant translation by Rodel, who renders Igov's prose with breathless lyricism, the novel, co-winner of the 2012 contemporary Bulgarian writers contest, is both a sweeping and small meditation on four intertwined lives, united and divided by both the unavoidable shame at the center of the human condition and the manifest beauty of being alive.
