A review by magic_angel
Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria by Kapka Kassabova

4.0

One of my very strong impressions of this book which I have talked about with you previously is that the author doesn't seem to actually have had a childhood. I find it extremely alarming how Bulgaria wasn't a real place with her honest experiences combined but rather her parents' money troubles and governmental issues. I found it very odd that a growing up human would be so concerned with anything but enjoying the world. Even if she did realise at a later point all of the stuff that had happened during her childhood it still felt like she was telling someone else's story. Namely, I presume her parents'. I felt like her book was a long confirmation bias of how right she was to leave the place. In itself this bothered me because you could feel the distance between her and the country she was trying to hate. In the beginning of the book she acknowledges this and says: "My chief delusion was that by becoming deeply absorbed by every other country on the planet except Bulgaria I could get rid of two things. One, my Bulgarian past, which was not of the miserable variety but bothered me nevertheless[..]Two, the need to answer directly the question nice people ask when they meet you: so, where are you from?" In this she admits that she doesn't want to face the country as it truly is or the fact that she has grown up there. This shame in her own head greatly impacts her need to prove to herself that she hates it. A lot of what she says is something that I have myself spoken/thought of, so I found it very interesting that to her there wasn't anything good. She portrays being from Bulgaria as being inferior: "The foreigners sent us exquisite cards from the other side. For a moment, you could even think we were equal". Granted, she has lived in New Zealand longer than in Britain, so maybe that's why I still got bits I had kept close to my heart, such as my friends and the community, whilst living abroad.

On the other hand, her Bulgaria isn't the one I live in. Namely I found it interesting that she had references to Orwell in regards to Bulgaria. Same Orwell references my head made and that horrified my experience initially when moving to the UK. With all the security cameras everywhere and the order that Bulgaria doesn't seem to want to adopt. In her Bulgaria this is a place of extreme restriction due to the political regime. One thing my Bulgaria and hers had in common was the fact that we both felt how people were just fighting for freedom. Bulgaria is always fighting for freedom. I've thought many times that Bulgaria has never forgotten its past with the Ottoman Empire's rule and I find that this is a trauma that has seeped into our cultural identity. Slaves. And it feels like Bulgaria is having a very slow time to grow from its past and learn to be free. Something that countries that were the occupier or ruler don't have to face in the same way. Thinking of Yane Sandanski and his words: "To live means to struggle: the slave for freedom, the free man for perfection.". The author takes it up to quote this and comment that she's still striving for some sort of freedom, hence making her a slave. And I think that even if you're free maybe you always fear becoming a slave and in this constant battle yet remain a slave. This makes me understand more why people want to get rid of history, generational traumas steer the wheel of how we interact with and understand the world: "Every second bridge in Bulgaria has a person's shadow built in. This is also the story of Ottoman Bulgaria in a nutshell. Build your shadow into the Ottoman bridge, it will kill you but what you build will live on. It's a suitable metaphor for a nation that lay low for centuries in order to survive". In a way her references to Waiting for Godot and Samuel Beckett in general are very on point, because Bulgaria has, for many years, been living in the same state that people do after the war, which is the setting of Waiting for Godot and the feeling that Beckett is trying to convey with his play. One of the greatest things I'm observing in Bulgaria is that younger people and newer generations don't grow up with the same mentality which gives me hope that things will really pick up here. I've been extremely happy to see all the events that people have started organising that weren't a part of my childhood, such as art bazaars, christmas markets, public light shows and so on.

She talks about how Bulgaria gets misrepresented and how people think of it as a reference to The Wombles. I remember one of my colleagues pointing out Bulgaria was a topic at a game show - an episode of Pointless or some other game show and the topic was Bulgaria -  none of the questions were things that represented the country in any way - The Wombles were included. Checked it and were left being overly disappointed and heartbroken. But I also remember how one of my mum's friends living in the US commented that Bulgarians are angry that no one knows anything about Bulgaria or where it is or what it is and her pointing out that most people can't name all the states or even a fraction of them. Kapka refers to the fact that Bulgaria is so unknown as a "nameless wound". I find it quite interesting - the power of names in her novel. Like the names of streets, or the name for a wound and the name changing of streets. Names have their significance places.

THEMES
The book centers and encourages the idea that money and good property are the backbone of happiness. In a quote: "Pavlina, however, was always upbeat, as if the limp, the excruciating walks, and the drugs that made her swell up were irrelevant details. I concluded that living in an old apartment, with a leafy courtyard full of cats and blossoms, probably compensated for everything else." I found it very interesting because she talks about the propaganda of the East block/communism but forgets to acknowledge the propaganda of the West where happiness CAN and should be bought. She starts questioning this western propaganda, however, when she goes to Colchester and sees miserable people that have evrything her family so desperately craves.

Time is displayed as stagnant: "'Listening' to the news was like 'reading' The worker's Deed, which was the only national paper, and seemed to simply rearrange the same content on its pages from day to day, year to year" which drags into the idea that nothing will ever change. In a way it connects with the themes of powerlessness because if you're stuck in time you're surely stuck with a situation you cannot change. Which begs the question if maybe emigration is indeed the answer because time-space is connected, and if you're not at the same spot where time doesn't move then time will go on at the new place. But time is also the enemy, because some things take time, which people don't always have. She displays it in her description of her childhood home now (after time has finally moved on at least a little bit): "Just a fraction of all this would have made a difference to us, the Cold War Youths - just one tree, one playground, one ful shop, one pizza" Time heals traumas and changes the world but for her time in Bulgaria was never moving forwards towards change.

Another common theme was powerlessness. Which is fitting for a childhood, where you are indeed powerless and depend on your parents so much. "Because if she succumbed to the forces of darkness, what  hope was there for the rest of us [..] I had lost her to that unnamed darkness that slowly drains luminous people first of their dreams, then of their beauty, and finally of their lifeblood".Powerlessness can lead to attempts to break from this feeling by any means possible, in her case it means starvation: "And if you can't do anything to the world around you, you do it to yourself" And since we're referring to governmental abuse and orwellian past, fear is present: "And so the body of the tragic Tatiana kept falling endlessly, in slow motion, from the top of that collective block of flats where we all huddled in fear. Nobody knew who might be suicided next."

The neverending theme of duality - past/present, foreign-home, dream-reality. The main duality has to do with the lack of stable national identity:"My deep suspicion is that it's possible, perhaps even inevitable, to live between - no, among - nationalities" She is constantly trying to make sense as to where her nationality stands. She often sees it as a middle ground or an ever-changing variable. Nationality is touched upon many times and one of the ways in which she looks into it has to do with nationality as a disruptor to personality: "A few weeks alone in the country of your childhood wreaks havoc on your imported adult personality". In such a way, it's almost a book in search of her. Her nationality is something she's trying to escape from but here comes the duality - she can't escape it, she will always have the two passports and she'll always question which parts of her remain in Bulgaria. "Here, we are the top crop export of Socialism. With several passports, foreign spouses and ex-spouses, dynamic careers, borrowed identities. And fractured psyches. Here we are, trying to heal ourselves". Nationality becomes a trauma in a sense, a trauma tied to her "borrowed" identities

IMPRESSIONS

One of the problems I had with this book was that the first part made me cry so hard and the second - yawning so bad. It wasn't well balanced and her disconnect with Bulgaria really showed in the second part where her attempt at connecting was mere facts and her own discomfort from being at places she felt she no longer belonged to.

I thought I'm gonna love her book. I thought she was gonna find peace with her past and the place she had grown up in. I thought I'd see another immigrant's point of view and get some positive insights into any of the troubles that come with being an immigrant. This book, however, had no intention of showing positive sides to Bulgaria or a different perspective of being an immigrant. I still enjoyed the first part a lot and despite my disappointment feel like I read and learned a lot. I feel like connecting with the troubled mind of Kapka did something good for me internally because it still made me feel understood in regards to many feelings I've had over the years.

This book was commissioned to sell to the Western audience and that’s all it did