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3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4/5
Pages: 512
Started: 15 June 2024
Finished: 21 June 2024
Summary:
Alexandra, an American teacher, has a month to travel Bulgaria before her teaching job in Sofia begins. She hopes to explore different towns, stay in hostels and get a feel for the country's culture. But when she accidentally takes a man's bag during a hotel mix-up, and finds it contains an ornate box holding the ashes of someone called Stoyan Lazarov, she takes off on an adventure to find the man's identity and return his remains--getting an unexpected, intimate view of Bulgaria in the process.
Thoughts:
I ended up loving this book. The essence of Bulgaria is so thoroughly imbued in its pages, and the descriptions of windy roads, small inns, and remote towns all feel so real it's very easy to be transported to the country through reading it.
The protagonist, Alexandra, is not a super complex character; she is more a narrator than a three-dimensional person, and aside from missing her lost brother, she does not have any super clear traits. Also, the first half of the book kind of all blends together, with lots of old people in small towns visited and spoken to, in a way that was a little boring (I think Kostova's editor maybe needed to be a bit more heavy-handed in cutting down the number of those scenes included in the book). But the story comes together marvelously by the end. Every person and visit clicks together to clarify Stoyan Lazarov's life, which is very cool. His narration was also by far my favorite part: the descriptions of his time in a concentration camp were brutal and heartbreaking, but so effective and compelling that I struggled to put the book down during those parts. The ending of the book was very sudden; SPOILER a dog taking out the biggest villain of the book in a 1-page climax wasn't super believable. But it was fun, and wrapped up the story in a way that was at least satisfying and hopeful.
Despite the repetitive middle, Kostova's writing is magical, and her depictions of music and torture were both very moving. I will forever associate this book with the image of an old taxi driving a man, a woman, and a dog through Bulgarian mountain towns (and Bulgarian torture camps) and while I'd be hesitant to recommend this book thanks to its length and slow middle, I do not regret reading it in the slightest.