Shelf Unbound October/November 2013 October 2013 | Page 28

translations

bulgarian

E

verything Happens as It Does
is a peculiar sort of Christmas
carol, maybe a Bulgarian sort of
Christmas carol, and if the reader has no
acquaintance with Bulgarian literature,
this novel may be a good beginning. The
book tells the story of an extended family
at whose center looms the evasive, yet
strangely omnipresent persona of Maria,
mother of three of the characters and wife
to two, a woman as difficult to grasp as
is her appearance (eyes the color of fog,
long dark hair, covering her like a swaddle
while she sleeps, her tiny feet the only
spots of white). The fragmented narrative
gradually pulls together the experiences
of the different characters (except Maria,
Everything Happens as It Does
who is given a chapter at the end, only
by Albena Stambolova to affirm the futility of speaking), and
translated from the Bulgarian gets resolved by a mere coincidence in
by Olga Nikolova time. Everything happens one Christmas
night?—?without the stylistic decorations.
Open Letter Books
As much as it owes to fairy tales,
www.openletterbooks.org
Everything Happens as It Does does not
deal with anything that we might call a
moral lesson. The characters are neither
good, nor bad. They have more or less intense experiences of a reality that
is shared but communicable only in sparks, and mostly through gesture.
They speak more or less. They love more or less. Their paths cross in ways
that seem both fortuitous and predetermined?—?in a nutshell, as the author
says, “it is the story of everyone.” The narrative style, very bare yet somehow
almost baroque, continuously intertwines two narrative viewpoints?—?the
minute description of inner phenomena and the broad strokes of the tale,
while avoiding the more common middle ground that often helps the reader
navigate temporal references in a familiar manner. And time is warped, even
if inconspicuously, in this novel. What is a tale without magic?
—?Olga Nikolova

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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2013