I don't know where I first heard about
Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe but I made note of it because I didn't have a Bulgarian on my to-read list (though I have occasionally pondered whether Elias Canetti could count for this purpose). Kapka Kassabova grew up in communist Bulgaria until she was 17, when the Cold War ended and her family emigrated to New Zealand. She subsequently relocated to Scotland and she writes in English.
Border is an account of two years she spent traveling and talking to locals along the border between Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey. It's part memoir, part travel journal, part history, part folklore. It took me more than a month to finish, but I absolutely loved this book. I started reading it after finishing Jenny Erpenbeck and Herta Müller thinking, perhaps, that I would stick with the theme of women writers from Eastern Europe writing about the communist era and its aftermath. But
Border covers much more than that. It did have some themes in common with Erpenbeck's
Not a Novel. In particular, coming of age at a moment when your world also changed entirely is something both books talk about. They were also written at about the same moment, and Kassabova's time spent on the Turkish/Bulgarian border was also the height of Syrian refugee movement toward Europe. Both saw parallels to the Cold War experience, but where Erpenbeck was writing about the refugee situation from some distance, Kassabova encounters refugees in villages and at camps all along her journey. She notes the change in direction, where in her childhood people tried to cross out of Bulgaria, now they tried to cross in. I was also glad to have the background on the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans that I got from reading Ivo Andrić and Meša Selimović, because the Ottoman history in the region comes up quite a bit in
Border. The ancient history, too, gets covered. Thrace, for instance, was a place I vaguely recall hearing of probably in an art history survey course (I can't imagine any other course I took where it might have come up, but who knows?), but I certainly didn't know anything about it or that it still exists as a region spanning the border areas of these three countries. Bulgaria was a country I knew virtually nothing about, and I was not much better informed about Greece or Turkey. Kassabova provided a great introduction to the region, as well as a more general exploration into what borders mean and what it is to live on a border. I'm so glad I found this book.
