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69
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
62/100Critics
77/100Scholars
Author:
Kapka Kassabova
Publisher:
Graywolf Press
Date:
August 4, 2020
Lake Ohrid and Lake Prespa. Two ancient lakes joined by underground rivers. Two lakes that seem to hold both the turbulent memories of the regionâs past and the secret of its enduring allure. Two lakes that have played a central role in Kapka Kassabovaâs maternal family. Setting out to resolve her own ancestral legacy, Kassabova locates a deeper inquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, one that confronts her with universal questions about human suffering and the capacity for change.
What The Reviewers Say
Borders and their intrinsic, deforming violence remain Kassabova’s subject. But in this book she goes further, tracing the intrusion of those cracks deeper into the souls and psyches of successive generations, herself included.
With a poet’s sensitivity, Kassabova meets with and tells the stories of the vividly varied cast of people who inhabit this fraught corner between North Macedonia, Albania and Greece, mining their conversations to explore the experience of 'identity as tyranny'.
The author is a consummate adventurer and indiscriminate observer, as drawn to abandoned monasteries as to fast-food chicken joints. Talking to strangers is her métier; in kiosks, at curbsides, and in cafés, she harvests myriad little sagas, which cast their own light (or shadow) over a land it seems no one can quite definitively call their own.
Experienced readers of Kapka Kassabova’s non-fiction know not to become too emotionally involved when she introduces you to a new character, in the same way as committed viewers of Casualty’s Christmas special have learnt to avoid doing so. In neither case do stories tend to end well. Indeed, if Kassabova were to filter out the dark from her writing, there would be little to discuss, except perhaps her great gift for describing nature. Nonetheless, you can’t help feeling as she persuades ordinary people to tell their extraordinary stories that she sets her radar to pick up anything that sounds remotely bleak or sinister.
