British-Indian Writer Rana Dasgupta: Stereotypes of Bulgaria in UK are Ridiculous

Novinite Insider » INTERVIEW | Author: Milena Hristova |September 1, 2009, Tuesday // 09:27
Bulgaria: British-Indian Writer Rana Dasgupta: Stereotypes of Bulgaria in UK are Ridiculous

Interview with Rana Dasgupta, a British-Indian writer, who recently published with much success his second novel "Solo", which is set in Bulgaria, a head-spinning tale of its people and places.

Rana Dasgupta grew up in Cambridge, England and studied at Balliol College, Oxford, the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud in Aix-en-Provence, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He lives in India.

His first novel, Tokyo Cancelled (2005), was an examination of the forces and experiences of globalization. Billed an updated Canterbury Tales in which stranded airline travellers swapped stories about different cities of the world.

Dasgupta's second novel, Solo (2009), is set in Bulgaria, an epic tale of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries told from the perspective of a one hundred-year old Bulgarian man


Your fiction has often been described as "global". Why did you decide to set the novel "Solo" in Bulgaria? Isn't this a country Western Europe does not care much about?

I began to care about Bulgaria quite a lot in the 1990s. I began to listen to Bulgarian music at that time. During the economic crisis, in 1997, I had a meeting in London with the Bulgarian ambassador, and his stories of the state of the country had quite an effect on me. I became interested in trying to express - in a novel - some of the intensity I felt about this place.

Bulgarian music offers a fascinating parable, I think, of the nation in the twentieth century. Steeped in five centuries of Ottoman rule, Bulgaria of course was familiar with an incredible variety of music - from Turkish, gypsy and Arabic to Bulgarian village music. All of this music was banned by the Communist state in 1944. Even Bulgarian folk music had to be re-written for the concert hall in order to be fit for new socialist Bulgarians. To me this is a poignant story of the birth of a nation. We think of the birth of a nation as a moment when energies are unleashed and people aspire to greater potential. But often the birth of a nation requires a lot of things to be silenced. Nations are quieter, more subdued, places than what went before.

One has to remember the fact, too, that places like the UK have become much more preoccupied by Bulgaria in recent years. Many British people have gone to Bulgaria to buy property in order to live out a dream of a better life - because the standard of living of the British middle classes is in steep decline. And many Bulgarians are now working in the UK.

In all these encounters and exchanges one realizes that the enormous sacrifices that small countries like Bulgaria made in the 20th century - which are the theme of the first half of my novel - have different consequences in the 21st - which is where the second half of the novel is set. In the 21st century, western Europe is in decline, its children unable to aspire to the lives their parents made. The emerging world, on the other hand, including Bulgaria and its diaspora, is propelled into the 21st century with far more energy, and with far less of this regret. Boris and Khatuna, who are the heroes of part 2 of my novel, were my attempts to show different aspects of this energy, and how it worked in the world.

How many times have you been to Bulgaria? What were your first impressions? Did they change over time?

I went for two long trips, once in 2002 and once in 2004. I arrived the first time on a bus from Istanbul. I arrived in the evening in Sofia, and it was pouring with rain. I went into the train station and saw that huge mural and was stunned: I'd never really seen anything like that before. I checked into a terrible dank hotel nearby, and had some terrible food. There I met some people who took me out dancing. We ended up at a hip-hop party in a basement near the university, which was fantastic. It was a strange and lovely evening.

I met a lot of people after that. They were large and generous personalities who made me love Bulgaria and its history very much. They were great storytellers, which is always exciting for a writer. Sofia is a place of such historical turbulence, and the people who have come out of it are complex and full of feeling, and I was tremendously drawn to them.

What sources of information did you use to build up the hero's and his country's past?

Mainly the stories people told me. There's not a huge amount published about Bulgaria in English - at least not about the kind of details about social and family life that I needed for my novel. So I relied on Bulgarians to tell me stories about their families. It was on the basis of this that I imagined Ulrich.

How was the Bulgaria that you saw different from the one you knew from foreign press publications, books and other peoples' stories?

It wasn't, really, because there isn't a lot of that sort of material. Bulgaria is not reported on that much in the English-language press. The economic crisis was reported, and sometimes you get reports about gangland assassinations in Sofia which feed an old "wild east" stereotype of Bulgaria and the Balkans.

There are of course a few stereotypes of Bulgaria: in the UK the stereotype basically is that Bulgaria is a legendarily uninteresting place. That stereotype comes about through a few tourists' experiences of nervous, humourless hoteliers in the Black Sea resorts in the 70s, and through images of machine-like Olympic athletes from the same period. But those stereotypes are obviously ridiculous. So I arrived in Bulgaria without much "baggage".

What is Solo about? The failure of a small Eastern bloc country and a huge social experiment?

It's about many things, of course. Music and chemistry. Success and failure. Travel and stasis. In the end I suppose it is about how a person deals with the story of their own life, especially when that story is something of a disappointment. That, of course, is not simply a Bulgarian theme.

As a researcher of Bulgaria's past, how do you think Bulgaria has gone in terms of overcoming its communist past?

I haven't been there for four years - I'm hoping to come back next year - so it's difficult for me to give an up-to-date answer to that. When I was there I was twice reported to the police by old women who didn't like me taking photographs in the streets. This conspiracy of the populace to clamp down on individual liberties struck me as very much in line with an old informer culture. The enormous hypnotic power that money and wealth have in contemporary Bulgaria is also an ironic legacy of communism. But none of this is surprising. The way that communism was implemented during those 45 years was astounding in its scope and it's hardly surprising that it takes a generation or more to work these things out. I live in north India, where the legacy of the country's traumatic partition in 1947 still dominates people's ideas and attitudes. It's painful, but natural.

What does a person or a country have to lose in order to move ahead?

The drive for change and achievement and success is one that requires a reconfiguration of forces. People and nations must strip themselves down in order to become more aerodynamic. What they choose to cast off varies from situation to situation but usually it is called "waste". It could be memories, feelings, relationships, interests - or anything else.

The raw feeling that many successful people have is due to the fact that the superfluous excess they always rejected is actually part of life. Waste, as the artist Ilya Kabakov has shown more eloquently than most other people I can think of, is full of instruction. It is the place of history and habit and life, and we cannot dispose of it without a sense that we are losing ourselves too.

So success always demands a price - from an individual or a nation, and from those around them. Sometimes the price seems very cheap. Sometimes not.

Does the hero Ulrich understand the meaning of loss and defeat?

Ulrich has experienced loss very deeply. It would be unkind to him to say he doesn't understand it. But he is not completely articulate about his own reality, and finally he prefers fictions.

How do readers in Western Europe relate to the hero Ulrich? What have been the reactions to your novel?

I think the reception has generally been very positive. It's recession time, so the general air of failure is quite relevant everywhere! No - more seriously - people are more and more curious about places like Bulgaria as they become increasingly tied to them politically. And the themes of this book - love, war, family, memory, friendship, integrity - are themes that concern everyone.

Bulgaria's politicians, society have been trying to prove really hard for the last 20 years that we are Europeans. Do you think Bulgaria is closer to the West or to the developing states?

Bulgaria looks like Europe. Its architecture is European. It shares many religious and cultural currents with western Europe. Its royal family came from Germany. Its moves towards the EU were very spontaneous. In very deep senses it is a European country.

But of course it does not have the same feeling about itself that western European nations do. It has a lot of the inferiority complexes of developing countries - it has a fragile sense of self because of its colonized past, and it feels that it cannot produce things - ideas, culture, buildings - of the quality or originality that western Europe can. It is cynical about its own social and political processes, and fears that it is not capable of creating a fair, content and affluent society.

These are profound feelings, and ones that many people in western Europe do not understand. Bulgarians will have to develop a great level of philosophical maturity and self-understanding in order to deal with the negative impact of such feelings, and to be able to function easily as full members of the international community.

Can you imagine writing a novel, also set in Bulgaria, in which the hero's yearning and dreams come true?

Yes. Though probably not in the period that Ulrich lives through. Not in the 20s and 30s. I could imagine writing success stories in the present day - and to some extent Boris (and Khatuna, though she is from the Republic of Georgia), who appears in Book 2 of my novel, is such a story. Of course he leaves Bulgaria behind, but one can imagine him staying too. Perhaps his success would be more wry and uncanny in that event, but it's possible to imagine it.

We need your support so Novinite.com can keep delivering news and information about Bulgaria! Thank you!

Interview » Be a reporter: Write and send your article
Tags: Rana Dasgupta

Advertisement
Advertisement
Bulgaria news Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency - www.sofianewsagency.com) is unique with being a real time news provider in English that informs its readers about the latest Bulgarian news. The editorial staff also publishes a daily online newspaper "Sofia Morning News." Novinite.com (Sofia News Agency - www.sofianewsagency.com) and Sofia Morning News publish the latest economic, political and cultural news that take place in Bulgaria. Foreign media analysis on Bulgaria and World News in Brief are also part of the web site and the online newspaper. News Bulgaria