The subtitle of this book is 'A Country In Stories' and I can't honestly say I'd go for this conceit, not because I know Bulgaria well, but because no book is ever going to do that. However, at the same time I'm happy to be convinced that Miroslav Penkov did his best to sum up his country in these tales. They are all a little longer than I like short stories, but so superbly written that I soon got lost in them. He chooses a range of characters of all ages, both genders and many different backgrounds to tell his stories. The narrator of Makedonija, the first story, says in his opening line, 'I was born just twenty years after we got rid of the Turks, 1898', which immediately sets the scene of a man who has seen a lot. The title refers to his wife's first love, and goes into the background of Balkan wars and the uneasy relationship Bulgaria has always had with its Macedonian neighbour. The title story also tells of a relationship between a man and a woman, and this time the neighbour in the story is what was Yugoslavia, and Serbia, in particular. It seems that you can't really tell Bulgarian stories without this reference to neighbours and outsiders. In Buying Lenin, the narrator's grandfather is an old communist, a bit of a diehard, but Penkov has avoided making him overzealous or unpleasant - you had to be a pragmatist in post-communist times as well as during them. The Letter and A Picture With Yuki have a more serious side to them - the first portraying the corruption in the post-1989 state at all levels, as it is clear that capitalism is not working for everybody, and the second with an incident at its centre that is ugly enough to affect the lives of everybody involved in it. The only story I didn't enjoy was Cross Thieves, focusing on clever, sassy, cynical juvenile delinquents, but it's hard to write about such characters without them becoming too clever, sassy and cynical, and I didn't think the author quite pulled it off in this one. Both The Night Horizon and Devshirmeh go far back into Bulgaria's history, and to that uneasy relationship with the Turks who dominated them. All in all, the negative things in this collection never overcame the positives, and I look forward to reading a novel by Miroslav Penkov.
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