Deyan Enev

Kurze Inhaltsangabe
Ein Mann beobachtet täglich gegen Mitternacht, wie eine schöne junge Frau einem Taxi entsteigt und im Haus gegenüber verschwindet. Eines Abends läutet es bei ihm an der Tür, und die Frau seiner Träume steht vor ihm. Doch auch Träume haben ihren Preis ... Der Boxer Shoro heuert bei einem Geldprotz als Schuldeneintreiber an, doch einer seiner ersten Aufträge betrifft seinen eigenen Bruder ... Freundliche Hochstapler, verträumte Bettler und kampfbereite Omas bevölkern die wunderbar tragikomischen Kurzgeschichten des bulgarischen Schriftstellers Dejan Enev. Dimitré Dinev hat die Erzählungen für diesen Band zusammengestellt. Vorhang auf für den Zirkus Bulgarien!… (mere)

This is a collection of 50 stories, some so short, that one blink and they’re gone, and yet what glimpses you do get are into a world of fairy tales, where Gretel is a prostitute and Hansel her down at the heel pimp, following a trail of tarnished Lev*.

This is a world where the lunatics have taken over the asylum, in fact all is asylum. Where a hitman has to kill his brother, where a ghost visits a pawnbroker to give him a watch inscribed to him. A world where a clown brokers a deal involving a lion and some gangsters, where a girl with dreams of being a Marionettist, wakes up to life as a cabaret dancer.

Circus Bulgaria is absurd, painfully funny and deeply sad. These tales reach straight into the cracked heart of post communist Bulgaria, some of these stories appear incomplete, more like fragments of a dream, things stop, not necessarily with a neat conclusion. Life ends.

Then there are the stories that you read, re-read and still don’t understand, the stories that haunt your thought processes, but remain locked tight, like shutters on a window, you know there’s something on the other side, but there’s just something in the way, or you would understand this tale, if only you had the right reference points.

http://parrishlantern.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/deyan-enev-s-balkan-blues.html… (mere)

The latest collection by Dejan Enev (published in 2009) contains 18 stories in a total of 87 pages. All of them a small tidbits from the life in nowadays Bulgaria - most of them sound memoir-ish (and definitely sound believable); a few set in the past which can also be memoirs; a few just could not be because the main character is not a male journalist.

I like Enev - he is one of the good new authors and he manages to open a window in the life to show some small pictures that show more about the world and Bulgaria than a full novel can. The stories cover a lot of topics and are very different from each other: a phone call from California which gives the name of the collection, parents getting the clothes of their son from the hospital, an O. Henry-style Christmas story that is very predictable but so sweet that it just works, a few nostalgic stories from the past, the story of an old nun and so on and so on. And as different as they are, they have something in common - they are real, not an attempt to say a story with a strange end or trying to find a way to surprise - just saying the story in the old fashioned way that never becomes obsolete. Maybe it won't work for everyone and maybe a lot of the stories won't even be understood properly if you had not lived here but it just touches something in me.

5 stars out of 5 for the book and another great collection from Enev.

* The translation of the title is a direct translation of the Bulgarian title. The book is not (yet) translated.… (mere)