In 1970s Bulgaria, the poetry of a growing girl

Joži is a little girl living in Bulgaria in the 1970s, without parents, but looked after by her grandparents. The world around her is that of an even vaster, almost infinite province: the Soviet Empire, which offers its inhabitants the final gasp of a rigid and decadent ideology. Yet Joži also grows into a woman, a mother and then a grandmother. Indeed, Joži moves through time, skipping and stumbling from one story to the next, which make up "Qui vive Joži" (Barta, translated by Alessandra Bertuccelli), the first collection by the poet Nadya Radulova.

A delicate book composed of luminous texts in which life beyond Cortina is vividly portrayed through the eyes of a little girl and then through the anger of a woman in a time that should have been liberated but which, instead, no longer seems to belong to anyone. The short stories are interspersed with fairy tales – a necessary interlude to dissolve the absurd truth of everyday life with a fantastical space that, whilst conveying hardship, also conveys desire: ‘Her first steps are tentative. Suddenly she realises she is wearing a white dress, that her hands are bare, that her hair is tied back in a ponytail and her face is completely uncovered, vulnerable’. Joži belongs to no particular time, but moves through events, revealing a new emotional state each time – a position between the real and the fantastical, living on a tightrope, the very same one that spans a reality that was once ideology and a dream that turned into a nightmare.

Nadya Radulova, however, manages to convey the gloom and unease of those years through language that is, at times, liberating. Anxiety thus becomes, despite everything, a possibility, the last useful opening for a new discovery: ‘Joži doesn’t like this part of the road, especially when night falls’. The animal world becomes the only possible trusted companion for every conceivable form of escape. Beyond the boundaries of an increasingly alien political era, it is the animals themselves that take centre stage: “The crows do not move. They remain still in their places and watch Joži. Joži does not move either. He just tries not to look at them. But he has no real way of being sure, because their eyes are so black that they are practically invisible. And not looking at the invisible is not something one can do consciously’. Magic seems the only way to escape a path laid out by others, but the magical is also the world that awaits Joži where history mingles and intertwines with fairy-tale, becoming a single, indivisible whole. The little girl and her mother, the grandmother and her daughter thus traverse time because they belong to it, both in memories and in future hopes. There is no possibility of choosing or setting aside one part in favour of the other. Joži is inextricably everything, yet also exclusively and always herself.

Qui vive Joži is a novel in the form of short stories in which the protagonist returns and disappears, taking on new guises and different roles. Reality, in fact, lacks the power to force Joži into a life dictated by others, or to make her accept a choice that is not her own. Spirits speak to humans and point to new possibilities, whilst reality comes to terms with fantasy – and not the other way round. Radulova brings her symbolic world together within these stories and fables, which give life to a character who is the opposite of a trickster, yet who moves through the same realms and times with the same freedom: “I didn’t know whether I fancied believing more in my grandmother’s rigid logic or in my own bad feeling, believing that Nevino would never leave my life without warning. That’s what I thought back then. That no one could just leave me like that, from one day to the next.” Joži will linger long in the minds of readers, like a luminous magic lantern.