Blog

Book: "Heart"

Author.

Genre: novel

Score (1 to 6): 6

From a young age I have been "tormented" by an inner urge not to read what "people read", not to listen to the music "people listen to", not to do what "people do". And while in my teenage years this was an understandable and often useful urge to reject all recognition and to establish my own authority, it becomes more of a hindrance as I get older. It's because of this inner urge that I haven't yet read "Clay" by Victoria Besley. But now that I've gotten a taste of her writing in her second novel, Heart, I'll be quick to correct my mistake.

I boldly declare that Besliyska has a talent for "great literature" and I believe that time will sift her out as a modern classic (yes, that's not an oxymoron). She approaches the text with care, almost timidly and quietly, with care for the language, for the specific words she uses to carve her images and the stories in which they intertwine into the rocks of Bulgarian literature. Her language treads on old, almost forgotten, Bulgarian words, plays with their roots and helps them to grow out of them into contemporary speech. She names her characters with them and portrays their characters. With them he builds the story in the novel, brick by brick, as if from adobe.

And the story in "Heart" manages to do its job with precision - to pass through the reader, to go deep, to play like a drum under the spoon and grab him by the throat. From the very beginning, the story in the novel goes from tragic to more tragic, until it suddenly becomes purified and enlightened. And we live it with the characters as if 800 years apart were nothing.

To be able to travel back in time - very far back, very far forward, up and down (in all sorts of worlds and realities) is one of the greatest riches, and the lifestyle and life of the Bulgarians of the late Second Bulgarian Kingdom is so little visited. From the history students we know and admire concepts like - labour, odor, pride, faith, kingdom, queen, dream, prayer, and we find it so difficult sometimes to feel and imagine them. Thanks to "Heart" this lack is filled in us. We let the past in, filling our souls with images and ideals deeply imbued in our ancestral memory and in our folk psychology.

In an interview with Victoria Beshliyska I read her words, "I trusted a vision in my mind that confronted me with the question of personal faith and spirituality imbued in our land. So I had to go back 800 years to feel even more clearly that there is no past, present and future, that Time is One. I wrote Heart in the hope that, in speaking to me, Time wanted to say something to all of us." And now I want to think about them. To believe that Time had something to say to us. And I think that since the books are so widely read and sold, and Heart isn't coming off bookstore shelves, and the Victoria parties are filling up with hundreds of people, I think that we are listening and hearing Time's call, that we are hearing his message. That we find the aforementioned values around us, or at least that we need to find them as we consciously reach for such reads. I think to myself that we are not a doomed nation, nor is humanity, that amidst all the destruction, amidst the pogrom of the planet that we are hurtling towards, there is actually hope. And it makes me feel good.