Publisher's Weekly Review
In this engrossing travelogue, poet and memoirist Kassabova (Twelve Minutes of Love) returns to her native Bulgaria after 25 years to explore its borders with Turkey and Greece, illuminating the area's often dark history and the lives of the people living in its shadows. Remembering her country as a site of refuge for individuals fleeing Communist East Germany, she interviews a man who was caught, tortured, and imprisoned by the Stasi in 1971. In Strandja she witnesses the ritualistic bathing of religious icons accompanied by bagpipes and fire walkers and chronicles the unbelievable story of a (supposedly) cursed Thracian archaeological site believed to be an "intergalactic portal." Throughout, Kassabova presents the border as a metaphor for the threshold of human callousness: once the line has been crossed into cruelty, there is no returning to the country of innocence. Wild animals abound, myths mingle with reality, and Kassabova proves to be a penetrating and contemplative guide through rough terrain. Agent: Jacqueline Ko, the Wylie Agency. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
As Kassabova travels through the hinterlands of Bulgaria, along the border where that country meets Turkey and Greece, she discovers that borders shape the lives of both those who attempt to cross them and those who live nearby. Kassabova, whose family immigrated from Bulgaria to New Zealand, layers the tale of her travels with insights into the country's Soviet past. Along the way, she meets border guards who have seen people survive the unthinkable, a would-be border crosser who was imprisoned, villagers who maintain their grip on traditions even as their hometowns are withering away, and a wealthy man who once worked for state security and who warns her against asking questions. The lessons of the past are brought starkly to life as she witnesses the trickle of refugees from Syria, before that trickle became a flood. Border offers a dark look at a world of smugglers and spies, where the past maintains its hold even as people struggle to reach a brighter future.--Thoreson, Bridget Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SURE, FREYA STARK RISKED LIFE AND LIMB traveling through Persia to give us her classic "The Valleys of the Assassins," and the indomitable Dervla Murphy has been to, and written about, almost everywhere, often with her daughter in tow (and sometimes a mule), but all too often the luxurious chore of travel writing has belonged to the men. So it's worth noting that some of this season's most exciting travel narratives are by women. In BORDER: A Journey to the Edge of Europe (Graywolf, paper, $16), Kapka Kassabova returns to the Bulgaria of her youth in order to examine the territory along its boundaries with Türkey and Greece. Borders, she tells us early on, "hum with the frequencies of the unconscious ... where the fabric is thin.... It is impossible not to be involved, not to want to exorcise or transgress something." And Kassabova reminds us that borders are also dangerous places, "where power suddenly acquires a body." With lyrical economy, she recalls the summers of her childhood along "Europe's southernmost Iron Curtain," where "every second barman was in the service of the Bulgarian State Security." But upon her return, Kassabova discovers that the "red Riviera" of her youth has given way to a land of misfits lingering in a limbo of fading hope and warped memory. The picture she paints is one of a place out of time, a forgotten, singular, in-between land. A local bar owner notes, "Living here is like a joke without a punch line." Yet this is also a place that clearly intoxicates Kassabova, and leaving is "like pulling myself out with a corkscrew." Making her way west through northern Thrace, Kassabova encounters "a hub for ... desperados and smugglers." Along the high passes of the Rhodope Mountains, things are so treacherous that "you would biodegrade at the bottom of the gorge and vultures would pick your bones clean." This is a land of curses, of mysterious fireballs in the sky that may or may not be dragons, and of dancing priests. It's not surprising that Kassabova - who has written three poetry collections, a novel and three memoirs - demonstrates a descriptive sensitivity on the page (climbing in the mountains, she feels "the pitiless sun hammering my head like a judgment for some distant crime"). But she also possesses the gift that's bestowed on only the best of travel writers: an ability to zero in on characters who illuminate the condition of a place at a moment in time. At one point, Kassabova comes across a fortuneteller who answers her secret, unasked question. "What you have begun you will complete," the woman, reading a handful of tossed beans, assures her, "but you must heed the signs along the way. Never ever ignore the signs." Luckily for both author and reader, Kassabova seems indeed to have heeded every sign and missed nothing along the way. LOVE OF COUNTRY: A Journey Through the Hebrides (University of Chicago, $27.50) addresses a homecoming of a different sort. Madeleine Bunting, a Londoner, confesses that "the north-west called to the restlessness in me," and so she sets out to "zigzag ... through the Hebrides out into the blue space on the map. Out to the edge." Over the course of six years she returns again and again to some of the 270 islands off Scotland's west coast, and comes to regard these wet, weather-whipped, sparsely populated outcrops as, to quote the Irish Gaelic poet Liam O Muirthile, a kind of "soul territory." Bunting follows in a long tradition of English writers escaping up to the region where the land fractures and frays. To her predecessors, she notes, "the Hebrides offered ... an unusual degree of personal freedom from convention and class." It was on Jura, with a population of fewer than 200, that George Orwell retreated to write "Nineteen Eighty-Lour." Bunting makes a pilgrimage to where he "set up his typewriter in front of the window overlooking the sea, and with that vista in front of him, he infused the novel with a pervasive horror of the dirty, urban tedium of its setting." Later she reminds us that it was on the windbattered island of Iona that Irish monks seeking a hermit's life gave the world the magnificent gift of "The Book of Kells." History along this coast, Bunting notes early on, "is unruly, and does not fit into an orderly narrative." Eventually, though, that history, "mute with trauma," speaks forcibly to her: "I had encountered multiple types of loss on my journey: of land, language, country and nation." Her travels culminate in a visit to the Hebrides' most iconic ruin, St. Kilda. After centuries of habitation, the final 36 residents requested evacuation from this remotest of communities in 1930. Lor Bunting, the loss still reverberates. Running under her entire narrative are the feelings Bunting has for her homeland, England, and for the larger entity of Britain. It's this relationship that's eventually called into question and cuts deepest. She has justifiable difficulty reconciling, among other injustices, the removal of people from their land at the hands of the Crown during the 18th and 19th centuries: "No other country in Europe witnessed such brutal clearances." This larger reckoning is what ultimately gives "Love of Country" its power and resonance. After all, what is love - of people, institutions or country - but the attempt to reconcile what cannot be easily reconciled? The "survival" tale has long occupied a storied corner of the travel writing genre, from "The Worst Journey in the World," Apsley Cherry-Garrard's classic recounting of Scott's 1910 Antarctic expedition, to Nathaniel Philbrick's history of the whaling disaster that inspired "Moby-Dick," "In the Heart of the Sea." Holly LitzGerald's ruthless RIVER: Love and Survival by Raft on the Amazon's Relentless Madre de Dios (Vintage, paper, $16) instantly takes its spot among these giants. The story picks up in the early 1970s in the midst of the long South American "dream honeymoon" of LitzGerald and her new husband, Litz. That they survive a plane crash in the Peruvian jungle, then escape a penal colony, only sets the stage for their real troubles. Making their way to freedom in the backwater of Puerto Maldonado, the couple learn that they're stranded. It's then that a mysterious, well-dressed stranger approaches their table at a local restaurant. "I can't help but overhear your difficulty," he begins. The man, who turns out to be a gold prospector, suggests they use a raft and float the five days downriver to Riberalta, gateway to points beyond. "No harm can come to you," he insists. Initially they dismiss the man's plan as crazy. But the prospect of no exit emboldens the pair. So they find a sturdy raft, made from four logs lashed together, and construct a tent of plastic sheeting atop it. "If you stay in the middle of the river," they're advised, "you'll get there faster." They are also cautioned under no circumstances to go for a swim. Why? Because "the cartdiru," a minuscule sawtoothed fish, "swim up your butt and latch onto your intestines, suck your blood until you die." Armed with this knowledge and little else, they set out in high spirits. "The river was faster than a galloping horse," LitzGerald writes. "We joked about which of us was Huck Linn." Trouble arrives that first night. Unable to steer the raft in the powerful current, they miss the border checkpoint into Bolivia and shots tear through the darkness into their makeshift tent. But soon the days and nights are blissful. "I don't know when I've ever felt so liberated," FitzGerald recalls. Then, on the fourth night, a drenching lightning storm hits. Atree collapses on the raft, missing FitzGerald's head by inches. They almost sink in the tempest but manage to escape. Dawn brings the discovery that their raft has been taken far off course - they're stranded deep in a swamp that rises during the rainy season. Worse, their supply of food has been lost. In this world of water, the FitzGeralds struggle in vain to find their way back to the river's current. They endure fire ants, suffer sunstroke and nearly drown in sucking mud. They sleep in a tree. Fear of attack by caiman, jaguar and piranha is constant. Strange glowing eyes peer at them nightly from the jungle. Bees swarm over every inch of their bodies - something they become nearly immune to. And they starve, for page after harrowing page, for 26 days, until they are come upon - near death, emaciated - by two Indians out hunting for turtles. The couple endure, maintaining hope and affection for each other. It's this that elevates "Ruthless River" above the typically heroic tale of survival. In simple, unsentimental terms, Holly FitzGerald has given us a most unlikely love story. Love is just one of the things on the minds of the writers whose stories appear in the best women's travel writing, Volume 11: True Stories From Around the World (Travelers' Tales, paper, $19.95). For more than 20 years, Travelers' Tales has been publishing books that might best be described as the literary equivalent of a group of travelers sitting around a dim cafe, sipping pints or prosecco and trading their best stories. With more than a hundred titles currently in print, this publisher has carved out a valuable niche in the travel world. The latest book's editor, Lavinia Spalding, hungry for travelers who "go with an open heart" and have "the inclination to practice human kindness, a sincere intention to build pathways of understanding and a willingness to be transformed," read nearly 500 submissions before settling on the 31 stories that make up this diverse collection. In the opener, Zora O'Neill finds herself drawn away from a resort's placid blue waters and toward the newly formed refugee camps that have sprung up on the Greek island she and her family visit every year. Like so many of the stories here, "On the Migrant Trail" is told with simple grace. O'Neill's account demonstrates once again that history's first draft is often written by the intrepid traveler. In a different vein, Samantha Schoech offers a hilarious yet ultimately disquieting yarn about spending a week in Venice - sans children and husband - with a gal pal and having perhaps too fine a time. Pam Mandel, in a poignant essay, deals with grief in - of all places - Waikiki. And a trip to Singapore reminds Abbie Kozolchyk of that most important of all travel maxims - call your mother. In story after story, the refreshing absence of bluster and bravado, coupled with the optimism necessary for bold travel, create a unifying narrative that testifies to the personal value and cultural import of leaving the perceived safety of home and setting out into the wider world. In NOURISHED: A Memoir of Food, Faith, and Enduring Love (With Recipes) (Convergent, $26), Lia Huber, a food writer and recipe developer, leaves the "meat-and-potatoes" safety of her Midwestern upbringing and sets out on a quixotic path of self-discovery. As a young woman, she is led by her hunger for enlightenment to the island of Corfu. There she falls in love for the first time - not only with a man but, after an epiphany at the sight of an egg fried in olive oil, with the deep pleasures of good food simply prepared. Upon her return to America, health problems force her further in the direction of conscious eating, and her fate is sealed at a San Francisco farmers' market "one Saturday morning in spring when a farmer held out a pea to me and changed my world." Huber is prone to such pronouncements and the reader might be excused for slipping into cynicism, except for Huber's wholehearted belief in her path. Finding her soul mate, Christopher, she sets out to make a career of her ardor for food. Passion carries the day over pragmatism and the two - victims of wanderlust - are off to Costa Rica, Paris, Guatemala, Italy, even Minnesota. Eventually Huber meets a man who might be called - to slip into the parlance of this charming foodie's travel memoir - her guardian angel, the chef Bruce Aidells, who magically appears at key moments and helps Huber land a job as a recipe tester. Although Huber wears her zeal and her spiritual beliefs on her sleeve as she moves from one inspiration to the next, she's endearing, engaging company and the reader roots for her success. Eventually Huber and Christopher adopt a baby, victories begin to accumulate, and the three approach a happy ending that Huber knows is merely another new beginning in her larger journey. Finally, in THE ROMANCE OF ELSEWHERE (Counterpoint, $26), the South African-born Lynn Freed offers nearly two dozen essays from a life influenced by the road. A traveler deep down in her soul, Freed says her "dreams of displacement" began "in childhood." As a young mother, she even became a travel agent in order to hide from her family her need for escape. "There has always been romance in distance," she reminds us. Yet it's the push-pull of the desire to leave coupled with the "strong attachment to the comfort, the privacy, the intimacy, and the pride of home" that has shaped Freed's life. "The rhythm of leaving and returning has kept me nicely unsettled for over 45 years." Without it, she confesses, "I would have drowned any desire to write in restlessness and despair." Freed approaches the world - and her prose - with the cleareyed, forthright wonder required of the most committed of travelers. In the essay "Keeping Watch," she recalls growing up "luxurious but not rich, safe and yet threatened, carefree if one did not think too carefully about the future," in apartheid-era South Africa, and of her childhood terrors at the prospect of a "Knife-at-the-Throat day" when the servants might "rise as one." Elsewhere she speaks eloquently of travel's power to transform: "The traveling writer is someone seeking... a sort of non-existence, the quest for which can lead, paradoxically, to the discovery of the self set free from the bafflement of context." And in the deceptively economic essay called "Locked In," she reminds us just how perilous it sometimes is to be a woman in the world, no matter how seemingly placid the setting. Freed is also one of the funniest writers around. And in "Useful Zulu Phrases, 1986," the laugh gets caught in the throat as she offers a hilarious list of some of the helpful hints that were once offered white South Africans attempting to learn Zulu in order to better command and control their black servants. In "Caveat Viator," she gives us a blistering, bone-true indictment of new age man's self-aggrandizing struggles to be at harmony with the natural world - from Northern California to Africa. In this marvelous collection's final essay, "When Enough Is Enough," Freed may be speaking for road warriors everywhere when she confesses to the occasional urge to "flee the things and the people that seem to hold me in place, to grab what's left of the life and make a run for it." ? ANDREW MCCARTHY is the author of the young adult novel "Just Fly Away" and the travel memoir "The Longest Way Home."
Guardian Review
This is a marvellous, personal account of the border zone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece, from the Ottomans to cold war menace and beyond Kapka Kassabova has written a marvellous book about a magical part of the world. In Europe's southeastern corner, where Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey meet, modernity seems to peter out in the ancient forests. The low mountains that give the Balkans their name force most of the traffic between Europe and Asia to run either side of them, while providing shelter and sanctuary over the centuries in their secluded valleys, and not only to the bears and wolves that still roam them. Strange rites and superstitions survive, customs and beliefs that have vanished elsewhere. Deep in the roadless uplands there are remote Bektashi temples, the remnants of that humane and mystical strain of Sufi Islam that accompanied the Ottoman armies centuries ago. High in the mountains of Thrace each August, crowds gather to watch the great wrestling bouts in the meadows. Thirty years ago, when Bulgaria lay on the other side of the iron curtain, the easiest way into these mountains was from the south, a flight into Salonica and then the eastbound train that ran towards Istanbul. It rumbled slowly along the beautiful Nestos valley, curving inland away from the sea because that was how the Turkish sultan Abdul Hamid II had instructed the engineers when it was built. Eventually you would arrive at Xanthi, a quiet old tobacco town that had seen better days: the market did a lively trade in locally produced Ralph Lauren rip-offs. The Muslim quarter, its mansions largely unchanged since Ottoman times, climbed the hill behind the new town, and behind it, the road ran up into the Rhodope forests. The first time I drove that way I thought it was perhaps the most beautiful part of Greece. The romance of it was, if anything, reinforced by the small military checkpoint that awaited anyone heading up to the Bulgarian border: throughout the cold war, those remote valleys were a security zone that required a special pass to enter. Beyond the guards lay the steep green slopes where some of the finest tobacco in the world was grown, flanked by the dwellings of their Muslim farmers. Greece was by this time close to 99% Christian but here they were Pomaks -- Slavic-speaking Muslims who had reputedly converted from Christianity around the time of the Ottoman invasions, and their minority status seemed to reinforce their isolation. Once the car crested the rise, the dense forest dropped away and pencil-thin village minarets rose from hidden valleys far below. It felt like a Balkan Shangri-La. Except that it wasn't. The area was heavy with surveillance and suspicion. Not only were the tourists kept out, the local inhabitants were kept in. The only investment in infrastructure the region had seen for decades was military. The border, as everywhere along the iron curtain, exerted its malign influence. The region slept, but it was the sleep of nightmares and neglect. Kassabova's story starts on the other side of that border, over the hill in Bulgaria, and it is full of restlessness. It shows more starkly than anything else I have read what the border did to the people who lived along it, and how its legacy endures. Her journey was made recently, but the memory of the years of the cold war remains strong in the minds of the people she lived with. They remember the soldiers and their officers, and the unfortunates who tried to thread their way southwards through the forest paths out of communism to the free world on the other side. She sees the initials of voyagers carved in trees, and her travels bring her into contact both with survivors of the perilous crossing, and with those who patrolled it and intercepted them, often with fatal results. There was a hopeless irony bound up with those borders. The 20th century had been a time of fighting over land -- the more land the better was the assumption. Yet by the 1960s, the villages either side of the iron curtain were haemorrhaging young people. Real land -- even the most fertile -- was losing its hold; depopulation was happening everywhere in Europe. Balkan states had made a special effort to ensure their border villages were well stocked: in earlier decades they had settled migrants there and tried to turn them into prosperous farmers -- there were plenty of cold war schemes to resettle abandoned villages with peasants from elsewhere. But with the exception of the tobacco growers, they mostly left for better jobs and an easier life down in the plains. Tourism transformed the coasts of Bulgaria and northern Greece. Ghost villages proliferated up in the hills. The only people happy to head for the borders were those trying to cross them. Kassabova is excellent on such ironies, which are rich in this area where states go head to head with nature, and nature usually ends up winning. As the villages age and decay, the forests thrive. Even the mines gradually decay; the massive bunkers that once guarded the mountain passes south into Greece are now crumbling. Eco-tourism beckons, and Kassabova, a poet, writes lyrically and effectively about the astonishing natural beauty of much of the area. But she spends enough time talking to local people and hearing their stories to give us a real sense of the psychic dramas they carry with them as well. As the narrative unfolds, an undercurrent of menace creeps in, for this is an environment that does not spare the unlucky or the vulnerable. One detects in the background the trade in drugs and prostitution that now forms a sizeable part of the real economy in provincial towns blighted by years of neoliberalism and economic crisis. In the foreground are the refugees -- Syrians, Kurds, north Africans -- the latest in the long line of migrations that have swept over the area through the centuries. In retrospect, the cold war was a parenthesis, an oddity: people in those years were fleeing from north to south. They were coming in from East Germany, Poland and Hungary, but today, those countries are in the EU, the promised land, and the flow is the other way. The locals come across, for the most part, as astonishingly generous -- as indeed are the refugees. And in many cases that is because the locals too were once refugees, caught up in one or more of the innumerable movements of populations that followed the collapse of the Ottoman empire nearly a century ago. For well over 100 years, western travellers have turned the Balkans into a land of exotic, larger than life, beliefs. Border offers the reader a large helping of strange inexplicable occurrences and compelling characters, but its author is engaged in something more personal and more engaging than most of her predecessors. Her origins, after all, lie in this part of the world, and her wanderings in the mountains are more a way for her to ruminate on the meaning of home than they are a source of fantasy. Or perhaps it would be better to say that home and fantasy start to blur, as she arcs across countries and centuries in an effort to free herself from the enchantment of this strangest of regions. In the end she leaves, but the spell remains. - Mark Mazower.
Kirkus Review
A writer who has lived in Scotland for many years chronicles her return to her birthplace to explore the idea and reality of boundaries between nations.Poet and memoirist Kassabova (Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story, 2013, etc.) left Bulgaria with her family when she was a child, eventually settling in the U.K. She returned to the Balkans, where "Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey converge and diverge," to explore tiny, almost-abandoned mountain villages and border points where, in the communist era of her childhood, those who attempted to cross in either direction might be killed. She found a new group of immigrants, from Syria, in the region, trying to get to Greece or Bulgaria but stuck either in camps or trying to make a living as individuals in Turkey. This is far from a conventional travel narrative. The book is as much about Kassabova's emotions and misgivings as the world of the senses, with digressions about dragons, magical springs, ghosts, and the evil eye. A woman traveling by herself in a part of the world where doing so opens her to being perceived as a prostitute, the author met and talked to men while the women stayed hidden. These men, whose real names she alters, are shepherds, ex-spies, Eastern Orthodox priests, smugglers, and former border guards. They told her long, complicated, and possibly true stories. She suspected two, probably drug dealers, of kidnapping her and fled in terror to the safety of three strangers living in "a paradise of lemon balm and fig trees." Telling her story, she includes bits of the layered history of the region, not so systematically that an outsider can piece it all into a coherent narrative but nonetheless studded with flashes of insight. A dreamlike account that subtly draws readers into the author's ambivalent experience of a homeland that has changed almost beyond recognition. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Memoirist, poet, and novelist Kassabova (Street Without a Name) offers a sensitive rendition of her trip back to her homeland of Bulgaria. As a child, the borders among Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey symbolized freedom from oppression and escape to Western culture. She gives a meandering description of how the past and present have merged with the event of the Syrian refugee crisis. In all times she describes, borders represent possibility, hope, and despair. Kassabova sympathetically tells the stories of those who live along these borders, whether they are trying to pass them, or to maintain their cultures' long traditions. Turkish and Greek cultures are dreamily explored via archaeology, myth, and history. The stories are mostly those of men; women remain in the background, while Kassabova stands out as an oddity, a woman traveling alone. Corrie James reads the book in a lilting, wistful tone, carrying the listener along through the nonlinear narrative. James's pacing is perfect, as is her palpable confusion and discomfort when faced with long-held chauvinistic and racist beliefs. -VERDICT While lengthy, the production keeps one's attention because of the large cast of unique characters, the information on a little-known part of the world, and the universal theme of migration. Recommended for most collections. [A National Book Critics Circle 2018 nominee.]-B. Allison Gray, Santa Barbara P.L., Goleta Branch, CA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
