/View.info/ Difficult novel… Difficult novel by a difficult writer.
At the very beginning, I want to say that Emil Krastev’s novel, placed in the context of today’s Bulgarian prose, has no parallel. At least I, without claiming to be omniscient, but claiming to know the trends in Bulgarian fiction, do not know an author or a book that can be compared not only to this one, but in general to the novels of Emil Krastev from his last years.
In these years, after a break from writing – a luft that was clearly broken in relation to the prose with which he debuted more than 30 years ago, he appears and with each of his books more and more definitely insists on his own narrative rules.
The most visible of these is in the syntax. Bulgarian syntax is one of the brightest pearls of our language. It offers such freedom of interpretation, of logical stress, of rhythm and tempo of the phrase, as is rarely possessed by any European language. The Bulgarian sentence can be infinitely expanded, the word order changed, the accents shifted, and Emil Krastev’s novel, turning this possibility into a basic compositional concept, tries to convince us that this is how modern life can be described more authentically. I know of only one other book with a similar syntax – an autobiographical novel by Sean O’Casey, translated many years ago.
“Media” is a novel of long phrases and the reason for this is very simple; so is life itself endless in series and reality shows, in shows and talk shows and in front of the screens in general – haven’t you noticed? – every morning starts with teas and coffees or with hot water, continues throughout the day with whoever is available, but necessarily with brandy or mint vodka, and in the evening it is a real party for some and all night long. But this ordinary everyday, mass life, the author has transferred from a garage, to a dump with the sonorous name Bunyland, and the characters are a pensioner, a bum and a last-generation television box named Kashi. From what has been said so far, it should already be clear that this is life in the troasieme age in a second-hand style quite believable, even naturally realistic and yet full of miracles, with real unimaginables. Such are the characters, such is the lifestyle, such is life, and this is already enough to understand that the novel is absurdist. But a series of questions already arise from any such statement in its categoricalness.
Those who will say that they cannot bear novels filled only with absurdities, must not at once be asked, how can they live a life entirely absurd? And when have the preferences of mass readers been a condition for true literature?
In the history of literature, these questions have been asked more than once. When more than 100 years ago Kafka turned his Gregor Samza into an insect and unfolded his life as an insect among a perfectly preserved everyday life, who estimated that this absurdist metamorphosis would become a symbol of life in an entire era. Then why, in our case, should we not allow that a talking box, from a TV of the latest generation, is fully capable of removing the luster from a virtual life that has completely replaced the real one? Doesn’t the box in business fulfill the same role that media plays in society – to package life?
Emil Krastev’s novel deals with the packaging of life, not with life itself. Emil Krastev’s novel cannot be understood without a global readjustment of reason and senses for the totally grotesque. I say global because it is not about the usual consciousness of a deformed reality and the ambiguous word of subversive meaning, but about tuning into a completely recognizable life, in a completely unrecognizable sense. The absurd situation, applied to the usual everyday life, awakens reflections on the crazy, if it cannot be called otherwise, the tame, voluntary ossification, otherwise too logically explained as biological survival. A pensioner talks to herself like crazy with a TV box, which becomes her interlocutor, talking like a TV.
The kinship with absurdism in Emil Krastev’s “Media” can be traced in many directions, not because absurdism has its own typology, but because ours constantly turns out to be outside of its classical pattern. Thus, for example, there is also a Godot here, similar to that of Samuel Beckett, who is constantly expected and who never arrives. But here he is a businessman, gone on business to the Seychelles, from where he constantly sends messages that he is finalizing and constantly turns out that he has not finalized. This Balkan Godot, unlike the real one, lives with dreams; his big dream is to return to eat warm, but with ten percent milk prepared by his grandmother.
Emil Krastev should be congratulated for this Kafkaesque plot, a plot that does not make sense in literalness, but in fact so strongly alludes to reality. And if we connect this reality with such a short novel title “Media”, we can count on a serious interpretive key for the text itself. Through this key we will read the poetics of the grotesque: everything incredible is real if it were not mixed with something fantastic, and the fantastic would also be real if it were not fantastically hyperbolized. Unlike Kafka in Metamorphoses, our author has gone further without having to invent.
“Media” is a novel about the grassroots modern mentality, irradiated and shaped by the modern media. It alludes to a sick, rather failed society, less and less connected to the human, more and more bound to the media in all its increasingly diverse, normal-jumping, forms. The book is cruel not only in the sense of today’s literary jargon, but also in the nominal sense of the Bulgarian word.
The most cruel thing in it is that we are unforgivingly overexposed to the “song of the sirens”, who, unlike the legendary time, do not wait for the traveler on a rock in the sea, but find him in his own home, where not Odysseus, but we ourselves become attached to their own chair, mesmerized by their lustful tongue.
“Media” is a novel that does not hide (on the contrary, pulls out of obscuration) what is happening with the language of society. The language of a society is the most profound indicator of the state of the society itself – this truth is not from yesterday. Let’s remember the Babylonianness of “Chichovtsi”, let’s remember the sobbing language of “Horo” in their roles of before and after catastrophic languages to explain what this “new language” tells us in “Media” by Emil Krastev. In the NewLengwich version of NewBulgarian, the words themselves have no meaning; they acquire it only in phrases. I will give for illustration only one (but I hope sufficient) example from one dialogue:
First voice: “Yesterday and I told how Opie was lying on the rubbish in Bunnyland and her heart was breaking with grief that she had been taken there without me. Then by chance the mayor passed by her and she cried: Closhi, they blindfold me.
Second voice: What are they doing to her?
First vote: They are teaching her. In New Bulgarian.
Second Voice: And who is Kloshy?
First vote: The mayor. Opie sensed that he was screwed like all bums and snapped the trap. He lifted her off the ground /…/ scraped the mud off the hood and /…/ Opie was seen to be in the evening.”
What does this text mean?
The most visible and most important is actually outside the text. And it is that two generations of the same people speak to each other a mutually incomprehensible language.
Now we should have understood what Emil Krastev is telling us with the dedication at the beginning of the book, which reads: “With gratitude to my children, without whom I would not have learned New Bulgarian”.
This novel will not be very pleasant reading for those of us in the role of Second Voice. They must force themselves into his style until they discover the meaning. But this is a novel with meaning, not just a description of a world of vast meaninglessness. Because in addition to a world of new Bulgarian, we are also in a world of non-stop sophisms in real Bulgarian, and the vast majority of literature written in Bulgarian is also sophistic and it is the dominant one today – a universe of pleasant nonsense.
The most important merit of this novel, in my opinion, is that it spells out the absurdity so that those who play First Voice can feel it. In this way, in the grotesque, the everyday language of meaninglessness is precipitated into the language of the media, our domestic, constant and impudent interlocutors.
Declassified this is really unpleasant.
But when and where were truths only pleasant?
Otherwise, why would the lies exist?
#difficult #difficult #writer
