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"Penkov's teeming stories accomplish in phrases what lesser writers take chapters to convey. . . . A collection of triumphs." ―Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
A grandson tries to buy Lenin's corpse on eBay for his Communist grandfather. A failed wunderkind steals a golden cross from an Orthodox church. Every five years, a boy meets his cousin (the love of his life) in the river that divides their village into east and west. These are Miroslav Penkov's strange, unexpectedly moving visions of his home country, Bulgaria, and they are the stories that make up this beguiling and deeply felt debut. Animated by Penkov's unmatched eye for the absurd, East of the West is a brilliant portrait of a country with its own compass.
- Sales Rank: #515846 in Books
- Published on: 2012-06-05
- Released on: 2012-06-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.03" h x .65" w x 5.22" l, .52 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 240 pages
Review
"... one of the most exciting debut collections in recent memory." --John Freeman, The Boston Globe
"... Penkov's teeming stories accomplish in phrases what lesser writers take chapters to convey... a collection of triumphs." --Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times
“An agile and assured debut . . . In each of these stylistically old-school yet freshly envisioned morality tales, Penkov burnishes brute circumstances to surprising beauty.” ―Elle
“Splendid . . . These stories are not the promising work of a first-time author. They are already a promise fulfilled--wise, bright, and deep with sympathy.” ―Alec Solomita, The New Republic
“Like Aleksandar Hemon, Ha Jin, and Edwidge Danticat, Penkov is a translingual. . . . His dexterous English prose [portrays] human beings left in limbo, without a compass.” ―The Dallas Morning News
“Penkov's stories combine toughness, vulnerability, and bravado. . . . This is a sparkling collection.” ―Catherine Taylor, The Guardian (London)
“A fantastic collection that lives up to its audacious subtitle . . . Penkov's writing style is clear and startling, filled with warmth and wisdom. . . . These are fearless, gutsy stories with tremendous impact.” ―Philadelphia City Paper
About the Author
Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He moved to America in 2001 and received an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. His stories have won the BBC International Short Story Award 2012 and The Southern Review's Eudora Welty Prize and have appeared in A Public Space, Granta, One Story, The Best American Short Stories 2008, The PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. Published in over a dozen countries, East of the West was a finalist for the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the Steven Turner Award for First Fiction by the Texas Institute of Letters. In 2014-15 he was the literature protégé in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, working with mentor Michael Ondaatje. Penkov teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is editor-in-chief of the American Literary Review.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
MAKEDONIJA
I was born just twenty years after we got rid of the Turks. 1898. So yes, this makes me seventy-one. And yes, I’m grumpy. I’m mean. I smell like all old men do. I am a walking pain, hips, shoulders, knees and elbows. I lie awake at night. I call my daughter by my grandson’s name and I remember the day I met my wife much better than yesterday, or today. August 2, I think. 1969. Last night I pissed my bed and who knows what joy tonight will bring? I am in no way original or new. Although I might be jealous of a man who’s sixty years dead.
I found his letters to my wife, from long before she knew me, when she was still sixteen. It was a silly find, one that belongs in romance novels, not in real life and old age. I dropped her box of jewelry. The lid flew to the side and the door of a secret compartment popped loose at the bottom. Inside lay a small booklet, a diary in letters.
I can’t imagine ever writing the kind of letters a woman would preserve for sixty years. I wish it was not that man but I who’d known Nora, back when she was closer to a beginning than an end. Such is the simple truth—we’re ending. And I don’t want to end. I want to live forever. Reborn in a young man’s body and with a young man’s mind. But not my body and not my mind. I want to live again as someone who holds no memory of me. I want to be that other man.
* * *
For eight years now we’ve lived in this nursing home, a few kilometers away from Sofia, at the foot of the Vitosha Mountains. The view is nice, the air is fresh. It’s not so much that I don’t like it here. It’s more that I really hate it. The view and the air, the food, the water, the way they treat us like we’re all dying. The fact that we are all dying. But I suppose, if I’m honest to myself, which I rarely am, I should be glad we’re where we are. It was hard to take care of Nora on my own, after her stroke. We left the apartment to our daughter, recently married, already pregnant, packed up and settled down in prison.
Since then each day is like the one before. Six thirty we wake up for medication. We eat breakfast in the cafeteria—thin slices of buttered bread with three black olives, a sliver of yellow cheese, some linden tea. Dear God, I remember eating better during the Balkan War. I sit amidst a sea of trembling chins and shaking fingers and listen to the knocking of olive pits on metal plates. I talk to no one and no one talks to me. I’ve managed to earn this much. Then, after breakfast, I wheel Nora up to the gym. I watch her struggle to make a fist, to hold a rubber ball. I watch the nurses massage her withered arm and leg. I watch their supple arms and legs.
The second stroke left half of Nora paralyzed, and all of her mute. Most nurses—some doctors, even—regard her as mentally challenged. She’s far from that. I’m sure that in her mind all words ring clear, but they roll out disjoined, like baby talk. Sometimes I wish she’d keep the jabber to herself. Sometimes I am embarrassed by the way the nurses look at her, or me. It’s obvious by now she won’t miraculously learn to speak again. That part of her brain is ruined, the fuse has blown. So why can’t she keep quiet? She manages to say my name and Buryana’s, and if I do my best to vex her, sometimes she manages a curse. The rest is babble.
She babbles as I roll her back to our room or, if the day allows it, out in the garden, where we walk in circles. I like the garden only when the flowers bloom. All other times the earth is damp and black, and I cannot resist the ugly thoughts. When we’re tired we sit down on a bench and fall asleep, shoulder against shoulder, with the sun upon our faces, and to anyone looking, I’m sure we are a lovely sight.
Then lunch. Then the siesta. Our daughter comes to visit once a week, and sometimes she brings our grandson along. But lately, with all the trouble she’s had at home, she visits daily. She is awful company, my daughter. We leave little Pavel with his grandma, so she won’t get upset, and in the garden Buryana talks of how her husband is chasing after another woman. Dear Buryana, I, too, might get upset. But here I sit on the bench and listen, because I am your father. I have no way of helping, no word of sensible advice. Hang in there, fighter. You’ll be all right. Words mean so little, and I’m too worn out for deeds.
* * *
I am asleep and disconnected from what has been or is. Then I’m awake. It seems that someone has dropped a tray outside. The wind rattles the gutters, the trees creak and Nora breathes too loudly. I close my eyes. But what if someone drops another tray? What if Nora coughs or snores? I lie, anticipating sounds that might never sound, yet all the same keep me awake. It thunders over the mountain.
I put on my robe and sit by the window in Nora’s wheelchair. I switch on the small radio. Quiet music pours out of the speaker, and I listen in the blue of the night, until a voice comes up to read the late-night news. The Communist Party is great again, more jobs for the people, less poverty. Our magnificent Bulgarian wrestlers have earned us more gold. Good night, comrades, be safe in your sleep.
Dear God, I won’t be safe. There is no sleep. And I’m so very tired of the comrades, their all-encompassing belief in bright future days that somehow I’ve started to suspect might never come. I turn the dial until I find the muffled sound of a foreign station. Romanian, it seems. Then Greek. Then British. The voices crackle and buzz, because the Party is distorting the transmissions, but at least at night the voices are strong enough to hear. I listen to the English and all the words sound like a single long word to me, a word devoid of history and meaning, completely free. At night, the air is thicker, and one foreign sound drags after itself another and they converge into a river, which flows freely from land to land.
I travel with this river. But even so, how can I resist the current of my worries? I think of Buryana. How will she pay the bills, divorced and with a little child? How will Pavel grow up a man without a father? And then my eyes seek Nora, who snores lightly on her back. I watch her face, her wrinkled skin, her crooked lips, and I can’t help but think that she is pretty, still. A man ought to be able to undress his wife from all the years until she lies before him naked in youth again. Which makes me wonder if she ever lay naked for that other man, the one who wrote the letters. If he cupped her left breast in his palm. But it is Nora’s breast, and wasn’t he a man? Of course he cupped it.
I reach for the jewelry box and pry the bottom open. I take the little notebook and weigh it in my palm. Someone has scribbled on the cover—Dear Miss Nora, Mr. Peyo Spasov, in his last hour, asked us to mail this book to you. This is as far as I can read now. Mr. Peyo Spasov. It’s hard to think of a more ordinary name. He must have been a peasant, uneducated, ignorant and simple-minded. He must have earned his bread by plowing fields, by chopping wood and herding sheep. Most likely he spoke with a lisp, or stuttered. Most likely he walked hunched over from all the work.
It suddenly strikes me I’ve just described myself. Of course, I hate this other man, but what if he was not a peasant like me? What if he was a doctor’s son? I turn to the first letter and read.
February 5, 1905
My dearest darling Nora. I’m freezing and my fingers hurt, but I don’t want to think of such things. I’m writing you a letter. We’re crossing the Pirin Mountains and tomorrow, if God decides, we will be in Macedonia. The Turks …
My dearest darling. I shove the notebook in the box and hurry back to bed. Under the blankets I shiver and listen to imaginary sounds. I can’t afford to read about this man. There is a chance, however slim, that he isn’t what I need him to be.
* * *
“So she’s kept a few old letters, big deal.” Buryana takes off her sunglasses. Her eyes are red and puffy and she blinks while they adjust to the afternoon sun. We sit out in the garden, on a bench farthest from all other benches, but not far enough from the sound of the cripples who drag their feet and canes and walkers across the pebbly lanes.
“‘Big deal’?” I say.
“Big deal,” she says again, and I’m terrified by how calcified she has become, consumed by her failing marriage.
“You ought to read those letters,” she says. “They might help the boredom go away. And read them to Mother. Why not? It’ll bring her at least some joy.”
Some joy! And so I say, “I won’t take love advice from you.” I mean it as a joke, of course, but Buryana is in no mood for joking. And soon I wish I’d kept my mouth shut, because from that point on it’s all about her husband and that other woman, a colleague of his from school, like him a literature teacher.
She says, “Yesterday, I followed him out of the apartment. He met her in a café and bought her a garash cake. He got himself some water, obviously he had no money for more, and while she ate her cake, he talked and talked for an hour.”
“You think he talked of you?” I say. She starts to cry.
“The worst part is,” she says sobbing, “this other woman isn’t even pretty. Why would he leave me for a woman less pretty than me? So what if I think that a grown man writing poetry is stupid? So what if I don’t like to read? That doesn’t make me a bad wife, does it?”
I put my arm around her shoulder and let her have her cry.
“This is a valid quest...
Most helpful customer reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Excellent Debut Collection
By Amazon Customer
The stories in Miroslav Penkov's debut collection, East of the West, are by turns dark, funny, full of both hope and despair, and a couple are even a little mythic, but the one thing they all share is their quality. Simply put -these stories are good.
The first three stories in this collection, "Makedonija," "East of the West," and "Buying Lenin," really floored me. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a better opening three stories in a debut collection, especially from such a young writer (Penkov is only 29 years old). In "Makedonija," an old man in a nursing home in Sofia, Bulgaria (where several of the stories take place) finds love letters to his wife from a man fighting for Macedonia's freedom in 1905. She has saved the letters for over sixty years, and now that she is partially paralyzed and mute from multiple strokes, her husband begins reading her the letters. It's a moving story with a strong voice, and the image at the end is truly great. In the title story, a town is divided by a river, and after one of the many Bulgarian wars, the town is divided along the river. On the East is Bulgaria and on the West is Serbia. Every five years officials allow the town to have a reunion, and during these reunions the narrator and his cousin, Vera, meet up and begin a kind of love affair or courtship. It takes the narrator thirty years to ask Vera to marry him, and though I don't want to give the ending away, things don't turn out they way the narrator has planned. In "Buying Lenin," winner of the 2007 Eudora Welty Prize and chosen by Salman Rushdie for inclusion in the 2008 Best American Short Stories, the narrator, who has come to America from Bulgaria to attend college, exchanges rather contentious phone calls with his grandfather (who still believes in the Communist party) about their differing ideals. The narrator, as a joke and a kind of apology, buys Lenin's corpse for his grandfather off eBay, and when the narrator next calls his grandfather to admit how unhappy he is in America, he is surprised when his grandfather tells him a large crate with Lenin's body showed up on his doorstep.
My summaries don't do these stories any justice; in fact, they resist summary like great stories often do. These, and the rest of the stories in the collection, are complex stories that effortlessly weave in Bulgarian history and culture. Perhaps I shouldn't admit this, but often when I read work by foreign writers I don't feel completely grounded in the story or connected to the events. Though much of what happens in Penkov's stories is completely foreign to me (and I would guess many American readers), I never felt lost or that I was missing some key element or cultural reference, but at the same time, I never felt like I was reading a history text, either. This is to say there is a great balance in these stories. Penkov seems to understand what his readers need, and he doesn't fail to give it to us.
I'd put East of the West up there with Alan Heathcock's Volt as the best debut collection I've read so far this year.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Unreliability Across Oceans
By A. Newberry
Generally speaking, unreliable narrators tend to stump student readers, naïve and experienced alike. While bookworms notice implicit characterization, ponder subtle themes, and discern the meaning of motifs, they often believe they can trust a story's narrator. In the two times that I have taught Miroslav Penkov's story, "Buying Lenin," not one student has second-guessed, or at least done so aloud, the reliability of Penkov's first-person, college-aged narrator.
Penkov's newly released story collection, East of the West, abounds with inexperienced, confused, distraught, and aging narrators--in short, narrators who lack access to truth, and who, in their perplexed musings, threaten the very idea of a singular truth. Yet Penkov doesn't explicitly portray his unreliable narrators as undependable; unlike William Faulkner's notoriously biased, unwell, and volatile narrators, as exemplified in The Sound and the Fury, Penkov's offer the illusion of stability, as they bestow wisdom on their fellow characters and conceive of marvelous plans. It is only in focusing on Penkov's representations of his narrator's consciences that a reader realizes she cannot trust the "I" who narrates. By making us privy to his narrator's most intimate thoughts, Penkov not only shrinks the psychic distance between character and reader, but also endears the reader to his precious and precocious storytellers.
"Buying Lenin," a story that Penkov altered drastically since its publication in the 2008 edition of The Best American Short Stories, funnels dichotomies, West versus East and capitalism versus communism, into two main characters, the narrator and his grandfather. A tale of ideals found and lost, "Buying Lenin" captivates the reader with nostalgic flashbacks, astute detail, and telling allusions to the volumes of Lenin as well as to his bodily remains.
"I did not expect to stumble upon an auction for Lenin's corpse. CCCP Creator Lenin. Mint Condition, it said. You are bidding for the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The body is in excellent condition and comes with a refrigerated coffin that works on both American and European current. The Buy It Now button indicated a price of five dollars flat." (72)
The title story, "East of the West," which begins with the chronological conclusion of the series of events, reverberates all the more powerfully for doing so. Again, Penkov creates doubles: a river divides Serbia from Bulgaria, West from East, and lover from lover. While other stories juxtapose the East and the West, this one centers not on one side or the other, but on the very fact of their division. The grass, we learn, is always greener on the other side, as the Serbians long for a lost heritage and the Bulgarians for denim jeans.
Although the traditional bildungsroman assumes the form of the novel rather than the short story, East of the West appears bildungsromanesque. One gets the sense that the characters who populate these stories represent a composite character, of sorts, who grows up and tries to find his (or her) way in a world of splintered hemispheres. Penkov's stories offer upsetting and beautiful vignettes of life stages, including growing up, losing family members, caring for disabled siblings, adjusting to a culture other than one's own, falling in love, having children, and losing love. At once distressing and startling, intricately crafted and gracefully written, Penkov's collection itself serves as a guiding narrator, a means of safe transport into and across a fractured world.
[...]
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A Superb Debut!
By M. Mitchell
This debut collection of short stories is a superb read. Miroslav Penkov writes about ordinary people, living ordinary lives, yet he is able to capture the lives of his characters in such rich, soulful, and meaningful ways; this especially holds true in `A Picture with Yuki,' and `Devshirmeh.' While the stories in this collection are humorous, with a handful of laugh-out-loud moments, they are equally dark and melancholic.
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