From The Times Literary Supplement
October 8, 2008
Back in Bulgaria
Kapka Kassabova revisits the country of her childhood, and finds its ugliness transfigured
Sofka Zinovieff

The newest and poorest member of the European Union, Bulgaria still lurks in the shadow cast by half a century behind the Iron Curtain. Westerners might recall the poisoned-umbrella murder, some champion weightlifters and something to do with yogurt, but Bulgaria is, as the author of Street Without a Name puts it, “a country without a face”.

Kapka Kassabova grew up in Sofia until the Berlin Wall fell and Communism crumbled. In 1990, aged seventeen, she emigrated with her family, lived in New Zealand, Britain, France and Germany, learned English and became a prizewinning writer of novels, poetry and travel books. Sixteen years later, having shed her past and settled in Edinburgh, she sees herself as a “global soul”. However, she admits that “everybody needs a ‘we’ from time to time”, and it is this impulse to unearth her roots and to reveal her country’s face that takes her back to Bulgaria. The result is an emotionally dark, ironically humorous memoir; the tragicomedy of childhood in Sofia, and a re-examination of a troubled land by an international travel writer, who has plenty of axes to grind.

The daughters of two intellectuals, Kapka and her younger sister were part of the last generation to be brought up in the full blast of propaganda and the through-the-looking glass logic of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. Their childhood home was a two-room flat in a cluster of thousands of eight-floor concrete buildings, “purposeful and sturdy like nuclear plants in freshly bulldozed fields of mud”: Block 328 in Youth 3, on a street which had no name. Cockroaches climbed the walls, barrels of pickled cabbage sat on the balconies, and you knew when the neighbours had diarrhoea. “Mum, why is everything so ugly?”, asked the young Kapka (or Number Sixteen as she was known at school). Education provided the only possibility of emigrating “internally” and Kassabova’s parents pushed her academically, while trying to keep out of the way of the frightening authority figures – “idiots in brown suits”.

Read the full TLS review online.