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Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria
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About Street Without A Name: Childhood And Other
Product Description Kassabova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria and grew up under the drab, muddy, grey mantle of one of communism’s most mindlessly authoritarian regimes. Escaping with her family as soon as possible after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, she lived in Britain, New Zealand, and Argentina, and several other places. But when Bulgaria was formally inducted to the European Union she decided it was time to return to the home she had spent most of her life trying to escape. What she found was a country languishing under the strain of transition. This two-part memoir of Kapka’s childhood and return explains life on the other side of the Iron Curtain. From Publishers Weekly Novelist, poet and travel writer Kassabova takes a meandering, bittersweet journey through her native Bulgaria, where she grew up in the last decade and a half of the Cold War. Her chilling, panoramic view of life under Communism is perhaps best caught in her memory of the "rumored disaster at Chernobyl," vehemently denied by the Bulgarian government; just as nuclear rain began t fall, the citizens were forced into the streets for a mandatory May Day celebration that left many to fall sick and die within the year. Kassabova's personal history, like her country's, is full of complex characters and overwhelming challenges; one of her grandfathers, she realized later, was a homosexual struggling in a country that forbade it, and Kassabova herself developed teenage anorexia: "If you can't do anything to the world around you, you do it to yourself." Written following her return visit as a 34-year-old "global soul," Kassabova finds the country she left at 17 still devastated, but with a new measure of hope. Kassabova's tendency to travel two or three decades in a single paragraph can make her a challenge to follow, and she too often gets lost in day-to-day minutia; though engaging and illuminating as is, a more rigorous edit could have made this memoir a page turner. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review “A well-wrought memoir about growing up in Bulgaria during the dreary Communist years.... As both an insider and outsider, the author is able to assess her complex country with a simultaneously fond and critical gaze. Delves deeply into memory, history and imagination. ( Kirkus Reviews)” About the Author Kapka Kassabova was born in Bulgaria in 1973 and learned to speak English at the age of sixteen when her parents emigrated to New Zealand. She spent time in Buenos Aires, Marseille and Berlin, before settling in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is the author of two novels, four poetry collections, and a couple of travel guides.
