The Desert, Within and Without

In 2005, the fabric of my solid bourgeois life finally tore — and in several directions at once. The first and most devastating was the breakdown of my family. My wife, exhausted by the endless pursuit of overblown dreams and increasingly annoyed by my constant hints that the truly great women of this world weren’t exactly the Marie Curies, but more the self-sacrificing types like Anna Dostoevskaya, Katia Mann, or Vera Nabokov, packed her bags and left me. I’ve written enough about this elsewhere; here I’ll just add that the sting of this unraveling was slow and — at first — almost imperceptible. I spent the first half year after the breakup in something close to ecstasy, because other magical things had happened — as a result of which the children stayed with me, meaning my life didn’t lose its meaning abruptly and completely. That changed later and plunged me into the longest crisis of my life — three or four years in a kind of hibernation, from which I remember only scattered fragments, mostly linked to visits to Bulgaria. The rest lies in a blessed fog. The human mind is a strange and wondrous thing.

The next sharp and sobering blow was directly tied to the books. After two relatively promising starts, the life of the third book began with great difficulty and twists I had never known before.

The first big jolt came when I sent the manuscript of Ghost Desert to the guys at PAN, only to receive a short message saying that unfortunately, they could no longer publish my books. That hit me so unexpectedly and so hard that for quite some time I couldn’t even process it. How come? How come? Wasn’t it supposed to be “the best”? How had it suddenly acquired the status of pariah? What had we done wrong? Where had we failed? The answer was as clear as it was absurd — at least to the person I was at the time: “You didn’t fail at anything, it’s just that the Bulgarian book market refuses to accept your books.” They don’t sell — that’s all.

It took many years before the anger, the denial, and the fury at the silence of the Bulgarian lambs gave way to the quiet understanding I live with today:
You cannot confront a society with modern ideas when that society, to a large extent, still inhabits the 19th century.
Because that is the “national idea” of this place — a place that has never truly entered the 20th century.
People here consume it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner without even realizing they are voluntarily living in a cave of the past.

What I mean is — it’s impossible to confront people with such ideas and expect recognition or success. My mother — a simple woman, not especially educated or cultured, but gifted with an extraordinary sharpness of intuition — captured it all in one painfully simple sentence, which for me remains the clearest explanation of my Bulgarian wanderings:
“My boy, your books are too Western. They’re not for us.”

You can’t say it more plainly or clearly than that — and I still agree today.

And it’s not that people here are “stupider” or “narrower” than anywhere else — nothing of the sort. People are the same everywhere. In the end, the dominant drive of at least 90% of humanity is simple: the desire for security and stability. And that desire, almost automatically, blocks the efforts of the exceptions — the ones born with “flawed genes” who cannot live in peace.

I’m fully aware that this kind of thinking reeks of coffeehouse philosophy. But years of relentless collision with this wall — a wall that makes the Great Wall of China look like a toy — haven’t left me any other conclusion.

Try to change people, and you’ll learn your own mortality.
That’s all the last fifteen or twenty years have taught me.

The problem with Bulgaria, as with every other small place on Earth, is that there are too few exceptions. The place is small, its traditions rigid, its mores stripped of any trace of refinement or aristocracy. For better or worse, there has never been any kind of aristocracy here — not even a spiritual one.

So the battle cry of today’s Bulgarians is typically some version of: “Get lost. Who are you to tell me anything?”
There are no established authorities, no consensus on values, no sense of belonging to the culture that shapes the spirit of Europe today.
There’s only: “We’re just us” — and that, unfortunately, is all.

And of course, the story of a child who is anything but a “child” can be received in many ways — but never openly — in a place like Bulgaria.
(Because the obvious “secret” of these books is that they are “children’s” only on the surface, in case no one’s told you yet.)

But I’ll stop here — before I crash into an even bigger pile.

So, I swallowed the anger and the insult and went knocking on other doors.
And this time, the world punched me hard in the nose — because the third book turned out not to be nearly as “fully formed” as the first two.

The crisis hadn’t come out of nowhere. Little by little, I began to realize that I had lost my sense of self-criticism and control — at least over the previous year or two. Put simply, I had started to believe I could just “do it.”
And now, all of a sudden, I understood that there’s no such thing as “being able to.”
Every time, you start either from zero — or from a (pre-established) ending.

Ghost Desert came out heavy and bloated, filled with long passages whose only apparent purpose was for me to show off something — knowledge, wit, sense of humor. It took me a long time to come to terms with that.

Then I got stuck — and for the first and only time in my life, I thoroughly edited a manuscript. I cut about a fifth of it, removed the showboating, and left only what truly contributed to the plot.

And I think it worked. I love and appreciate this book just as much as the first two. I find its structure — and especially its ending — just as dynamic.
And I see in it something that the others don’t have: here, Anne has truly stopped being a child.
There’s even a moment where she says it out loud:

“In the Ghost Forest, there are no children. Here, everyone is an adult.”

In the end, Ghost Desert was published by a house I had never heard of. Strangely (or perhaps quite predictably), this didn’t change the overall picture of its market “existence” in any meaningful way. It sold about the same as the first two — in dribs and drabs. Well, no point looking a gift horse in the mouth — I accepted it. At one point we even made new editions of all three books. But by then, I had already begun to learn the one thing that’s kept me afloat in the Bulgarian swamp all these years:
“Never expect anything — or you will surrender.”

And that’s how I live to this day. My relationship with Bulgaria is starting more and more to resemble the one between Voltaire and God (“we greet each other, but we don’t speak”). She doesn’t look at me, I don’t look at her — and may the last one out please close the door.

And yet, I kept holding on to hope.
I still do — but only for something beyond Bulgaria.
More on that — later.