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Book: 'Before I was born and after my death'

Author.

Genre: Novel

Score (1 to 6): 6

I had read that some tribes greet a man's birth with deep sorrow and his death with joy and gladness. A most wise attitude to human existence.

Our dear and beautiful Dobrudja - with its golden wheat and colourful characters. A small Dobrudja, but it gave birth to such great writers who managed to properly praise and immortalize it. Yovkov has long been a favourite of mine and with him I have cultivated a love for this narrative. But Ivaylo Petrov makes me feel so many different emotions while reading.

"I liked Before I Was Born and After I Was Dead (as stories with separate storylines) a lot back in school - I remember. I didn't remember their content well, but I did remember that for my enviable 15 years (in 8th grade) the idea of ancestral memory excited me. The concept that our history as individuals begins before we are born and, perhaps fortunately, does not end with our death, still holds strong with me.

A wealth of humour, subtle sarcasm and beautiful natural pictures of the Bulgarian countryside, which even Yovkov would have envied, complement the story wonderfully. And the story represents the life of Ivaylo Petrov, or rather his family. "Before I Was Born, the first part of the novel, is a short story full of genius.

No, I'm not exaggerating, really. The author is describing the life of the family he was lucky enough to be born into - a very typical rural home from exactly (almost) 100 years ago. A home with all its folk wisdom and culture - practices of outbidding between the families of the bride-to-be, bride-stealing customs, home farming, kneeling a pig by an entire village, Christmas by an entire village, the birth of an infant the entire village considers their own, working in the fields at all hours (of the day and the development of the individual). Petrov sculpts these pictures, so precious even in themselves, with the subtlest humour and irony, and obtains a comprehensive portrait of the Bulgarian village and its inhabitants. One hand - he gets a comprehensive portrait of our national psychology.

The other 2 parts, "After This" and "After My Death", put together, are also a treasure. Apart from the aforementioned humour, they are full of wisdom, with peculiar philosophical and psychological analyses.

Ivaylo Petrov narrowly escaped death twice at the front in Hungary. These experiences undoubtedly inspired this work, which I know I will reread for the rest of my life. Everyone, at one time or another, inevitably thinks about death - some of us more than others. But to have the opportunity and, my god, the talent to describe one's own death - to peer behind the veil of the veil between the worlds of one's own life, if only in one's imagination, is a rare treasure and richness.

To describe your own funeral in a comic way, to imagine who will be "there" to send you on your eternal way, but not with pity and dreams of the words you will hear about yourself one day, but again with subtle humor and realism about your good and bad traits and human nature in general. That, I think, is to laugh at death! Something that philosophers (and why not all of us) have been dreaming of since the world began.