You Can Smile on Wednesdays

Zdravka Evtimova’s novel You Can Smile on Wednesdays focuses on day-to-day lives of three sisters Luba, Sara and Pirina who live in the small Bulgarian town of Radomir.  Pirina sings songs that have no tunes, but can ease loneliness and pain; Sara has numerous boyfriends. One of them builds a church for her in which loners go to pray and soon find love. Luba reads all the time, so much that she absents herself from real world, a fact that makes her attractive in some illogical yet convincing way. We never go in the same river twice —  the river does not follow the route that universe has mapped out for it; its waters flow with the songs into which the characters have transformed their lives.


The Bulgarian poet Valentin Dishev was the first to define Zdravka Evtimova’s fiction as “mythical realism”. In this concept, he includes the author’s ability to create contemporary myths: through sharp realism and subtlety, Zdravka Evtimova reveals truths whose roots go back to the past and talk to the future