Access Street Without A Name: Childhood And Other Misadventures In Bulgaria Executed By Kapka Kassabova Accessible As Mobi

were living inside George Orwell'sbut we didn't know it because it was on the list of banned books'.


As a ' Western European', my knowledge about living under a communist regime was based on the limited education on this topic during high school.
This book has been an eyeopener, told by someone that has been on both sides of the fence.
Funny anecdotes are interspersed by troubled stories and make up for a read that keeps you entertained throughout the book.
I'm certainly interested in reading more books from this author, especially a 'Border: a journey to the edge of Europe'.
Although the writer is not obliged to stick to the historical truth, expressing your options facts is dishonest.
Also, catering for the taste of the Western publicsome of them visited Bulgaria during the communist era snd won't buy this 'everything is ugly theme is offputting.

The inaccuracies are far too many to mention:
, Bulgarian state encouraging kids snd students to watch a film about ottoman atrocities is laughable, Apparently, the sinister plot is to make thrm support the opresión snd prosecución of ethnical Bulgarian Turks! Memoir, history book, travelogue: this book is written with clarity, honesty, sentiment not sentimentality, and humor.
It's beautifullywritten. The family stories are touching, The history portions scratch the surface of huge gaps in my knowledge, And the sections devoted to Kassabova's country of Bulgaria had me googling images of almost every place she mentions.
In fact it would be nice if there were a map in this book for easy reference.


Between Hotel Drustur and the Golden Dobrudzha, I have walked exactly five minutes and twentyfive years.

And let's face it: since arriving a few weeks ago, I haven't been myself, A few weeks alone in the country of your childhood wreaks havoc on your imported adult personality.
p.

I am going now, and I know never to disturb the natural laws of that country where the people we used to be stroll along the fault lines of a whitecliffed town, eating vanilla ice cream in the slightly otherworldly September light.
p.

was also the year after the assassination by State Security of the dissident writer Georgi Markov in London with a poisontipped umbrellaBulgaria's main claim to

fame in the last century, if we don't count weightlifters with hairy backs.
But that year I was preoccupied by a far more momentous event: the kindergarten summer camp, p.

I'm fully prepared to admit that my dislike of this book is on me, It took me soooo long to get into this book and commit, I was looking for a text I could recommend to my high school history students to give them a glimpse into life behind the iron curtain and after the collapse of the USSR.
I found a few excerpts that are really quite telling, but I would never recommend this whole book to a student.


First, the nonlinear narrative is not effective, I appreciate the flashback as the author has left her home country and returns, but as that keeps happening, the choppiness hurts the narratives flow.


Second, and I know a dear friend of mine will sigh in resignation at this complaint that I make often, but the characterization is TERRIBLE.
I don't even feel like I know Kapka, She seems wholly without personality as she drops these pebbles about her life and herself into the narrative but never returns to them.
For example, her parents bickering and hintedat divorce, We never get her feelings in relation to that, Her eating disorder is hinted at again and again, but never truly explored, Her relationship to Michael, and so many other tidbits, At one point the author admits that her grandmother has lived a life of suppressed emotion in order to deal with her homosexual husband and his angry outbursts, but I wonder if emotionless women are the order of the day in this family, because Ms.
Kassabova herself seems devoid of emotion, Since I struggled to connect with her, the mention of other characters she interacted with was flat.
When/if she returned to these characters, they meant nothing to me,

Third, the historical detail, I struggle to critique this because I definitely chose the book b/c I wanted some of that, but in reality, this book could have beenpages shorter.
There's a lot of weird, robotic remember the author is emotionless, fluff, My favorite parts were when the author would tell little vignettes about Bulgarians she would meet when returning home, but in between meeting these people there was so much extra.


I don't know, I'm sad that I didn't like this book, but there it is, A memoir that doubles up as a travelogue, the book looks out from the personal toward the community.
The author traverses through the history and geography of Bulgaria, giving us a kaleidoscope of personal stories heavily impacted by politics.

The memories tinged by the sweeping changes in time and space offer several moments to pause and think, yet never abandon the sense of movement and journey.

The witty narration makes it light despite the emotional baggage carried by the author,./, rounded down. This is a good book, but a few parts drone on far too long, The prose is crisp, though at times it wades into a pretentiousness I could've done without, Kapka Kassabova grew up in Bulgaria under the Communist regime, immigrating to New Zealand in, at the age of.
In the years after her departure, she returned to the country several times to visit older relatives and to sightsee.
The first part of this book is a solidstar memoir about her childhood the rest documents her travels and earns.
orstars. Unfortunately, the travel section is the longer, so Im rounding down,

The memoir immediately captured my attention with stories of life amidst hardship, Although Kassabovas parents were welleducated, the family lived in two rooms in a shoddily constructed concrete apartment building, surrounded by mud and thousands of other, identical buildings the chance to buy anything new was so rare and even dangerous when shoppers physically fought over merchandise that the authors mother had a breakdown on a visit to a Dutch department store and interactions with anyone from the other side of the Iron Curtain were fraught, as they truly came from different worlds.
One escape was music in a twist of irony, as a teenager Kassabova enjoyed protest music from the West.
The censors allowed it through because the lyrics raged against the capitalist machine, not realizing that teens reversed the meaning, raging instead against the only machine they knew.


The writing is clear, descriptive, and a little selfdeprecating, and so combined with interesting material, the first section succeeds.
But then we get to the travel, Kassabova initially presents her trip inas a return to Bulgaria after many years away, but it soon becomes clear that she has traveled in the country as an adult on several occasions, and she splices these trips together, cutting back and forth between different visits to the same or nearby places, which is disorienting.


There doesnt seem to be much direction to Kassabovas travel the organization of this section felt scattershot, and the reader gets little sense of why we should be interested in these particular places.
Im not sure what the author was looking for on this trip, but dont believe she found it the whole book is rather melancholy.
Certainly Bulgaria doesnt seem to have improved much with the fall of communism the overall picture Kassabova paints is one of foreign investors getting rich while regular people struggle to get by without a safety net and smaller towns continue to decay.
But I was interested to read about how the country has changed, as well as a bit of its earlier history, and the authors conversations with the people she meets are often entertaining.


Ultimately, this one is a cautious recommend: certainly worth reading if you are interested in the subject matter, but not the first book I would urge on an armchair traveler.
The best part of this book was the fact that the author grew up in the neighborhood I live in, so I recognized many of the streets and local landmarks she references hey, there's a photo of our McDonald's!.
Other than this novelty factor, though, this book really paled in comparison to other Bulgarian books I've read and international comingofage stories in general Persepolis comes to mind as a similar story but is far better, not only in quality of writing but also, ironically, in giving a compelling portrayal of Bulgaria and the Balkan region.
The frequent and direct comparisons to Orwell'swere heavy handed and sounded trite and adolescent my Bulgarianth graders who just finished readingcould pick apart some of the flawed parallels in a heartbeat, reducing this complex country and people into a kind of archetype, and while I did like some of the stories surrounding Kassabova's education in the French lycee in Sofia and the subsequent lack of a sense of place for herself and her classmates, the contemporary parts of the book with the author roadtripping around Bulgaria were fragmented, hard to follow, and frankly seemed exploitative as did much of the book overall.
I don't know much about the author, but I very much got a sense of, "I know how I will break out as a writer I will Write a Book about my Obscure Country and it will be my Literary Niche" and thus the road trip felt like a means to that end rather than a sincere and organic reflection on her country of birth.
Also, the book needs a way better editor/proofreader i, e. , someone who can get the spelling of "Libya" correct on a consistent basis, This book is part autobiographic and part travel, The author grew up in communist Bulgaria and left, along with her family, after the fall of communism.
The first third of the book is about what it was like to grow up in communist Bulgaria.
The rest of the book is about how capitalism has affected Bulgaria, told through a series of return visits over the years, visiting family and friends.
She writes about poverty, corruption and change, some of it good, and some of it very depressing.


I enjoyed reading it and give itout ofstars, The book is very engaging, especially for those of us who lived through that period in communist and postcommunist Bulgaria.
The first part is amazing, it reflects to the tiniest details the absurdity of everyday life during thes ands.
It made me cry more than few times, The second part is definitely engaging too, even though I felt it was a little rushed and forced at times.
I like Kapka Kassabova's sense of humor even though I think some of its beauty was lost in the translation.
Street Without A Name by Kapka Kassabova

A mustread for anyone interested in Bulgaria, Street Without A Name tracks the
emotional and physical journies experienced by the author as she revisits the land of her birth soon after its entry to the European Union.


Glimpses into her childhood and teens years under communist rule are written with
passion but never sentimentality against a backdrop of cuttingly outlined history.
We see both the big picture and the small one: a forced exodus described by the government as a holiday at the time detailed visits to loved grandparents repeated at intervals until death intervenes.


For me, the book has a particular fascination as some of the descriptions of how people lived 'back then', could almost have been written today.
Communism ended inBulgaria entered the EU inbut in some respects, only the storefront has changed.


Kapka Kassabova's Street Without A Name is a roller coaster of a read, a true tour de force and a history lesson all in one.
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