Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow
One of the hallmarks of strong writing is a profoundly rooted sense of place, a deep pathos that arises from the topology of particular geographies. To fully appreciate Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow by Iana Boukova, one must feel the historical vibrations of the Balkans, a tragically fragmented and frequently reconfigured part of the world, where languages and sociocultural personalities vary, and yet remain somehow connected. I greatly admire Boukova’s delicate tour through these shadowy tales that feel like dreams, though not necessarily nightmares. Perhaps the word I’m searching for is “ghostly,” almost a Pedro Páramo confrontation with the complicated and spiritually plagued apparitions of the still-living in settings fit for the dead. This translation from the Bulgarian, courtesy of Ekaterina Petrova and New York Review Books, speaks of places at best neglected and at worst forgotten, crying out from beyond the grave. We follow the adventures of downtrodden characters whose lives tangentially intersect across narrative borders, until the novel transforms into something else entirely, a metafictional feast that betrays the free-flowing dexterity of a writer who has nothing to prove but proves her ability anyway.
Petrova examined Boukova’s own musings on her method for a piece in Asymptote, which sheds useful context on this enigmatic artist. We learn that Boukova considers herself a poet first, that her prose possesses the timbre and tenor of poetic license, its density, unpredictability, and expansive capacity. She’s also a prolific translator in her own right, an eminently capable classicist with both linguistic and residential ties to Greece. One can sense and verify these calling cards within the span of a few pages of Traveling. Boukova is the consummate technician at the level of the word. In fact, there’s a passage midway through where a character experiences a mental infiltration and occupation by individual words: “One warm and windless night, his slumber tore, and he caught a word in his mouth. He kept repeating it and re-repeating it . . . He carefully took the word out into the open of the clear night, and it was oversquanderous . . . He ran the word through his life—it fit into place everywhere and did not say anything anywhere” (158). Next come dogheaded and moron. It escalates to a crescendo: “And each new word got in the way of those that came before it, as though maliciously begrudging any sort of combination that might approximate meaning. That was how he pulled out slaughter, laughingstock, crooked, hovel, wherefore, squeaky, hedgehog, baseless, out, who, and, for some unknown reason, another hovel” (159). Anyone who’s experienced the throes of a certain brand of mania knows what she means. The whole book is like that—a play on language from the largest to smallest scales that refuses to fit into the boxes of poetry or prose or prose poetry or whatever the hell you might call it.
To elevate our scope to a satellite view, Boukova furthermore concerns herself with the concept of story itself. Chapters begin with apparent citations of a novel of the same name, except written by the fictional nineteenth-century Dutch author, Ian Van Athen. Nestled within various sections are fables, quintessential Aesopic morality tales, told (incompletely) in Arabic on a tapestry or illuminated on the pages of a monastic scribe. All of this is bracketed by the novel’s interlaced narratives that seemingly don’t connect until, frequently, the final passages of the vignettes. Boukova makes no secret of why she takes this approach—the story within the story. “Through the night, their mother told them tales about bottomless wells through which you fall into another world, and from there into another one, and you scream, and grow breathless, and do not awake, and there is no end” (91). The reader is Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole, often bewildered, and Boukova is either laughing or crying (I’m not sure which) as her creation swallows us. What is the Truth of the novel, to say nothing of facts? It turns out reality is stranger than fiction in the sense that transcribing the latter is somehow the simpler task: “He reached the conclusion that, all in all, stories told were easier to write down than stories experienced. The easiest stories to write down were the made-up ones” (263). This mode of unabashedly fanciful fiction-writing runs counter to the trend du jour of so-called “autofiction,” the Knausgaardian attempt to [re]tell one’s life, not necessarily as it was, but as it seemed. Boukova is content to tell a good story, the real source of which remains hidden from view.
What to make of the skeletal structure and the plot as such? The novel is divided into two parts, the first stretching nearly two hundred pages across five sub-parts and the second wrapping it up in three for the remaining hundred. Boukova titles each chapter with the name of its primary character, followed by an “;or,” and an esoteric descriptor. To begin, we find a somber village-bound mother in troubled times, a seemingly average man who happens to possess supernatural good luck, a promiscuous woman with “Enough Love for Everyone,” a monk turned minor warlord, and more. The generations ebb and flow together with overlapping children and lovers and chance encounters between strangers. One perhaps hesitates to call it magical realism, but the narrative and its raft of language certainly refuse to carry the reader gently down the stream. Shades of García Márquez and Calvino blanket the ground before us, and Boukova does not shy away from these associations.
Then we come to the bifurcation mark and discover the apparent authorial counterpart in male form. Ian Van Athen, just like Boukova, is classically trained, the similarities as specific as their mutual translations of Catullus. He’s a writer who believes “the faster a person writes, and the heavier his hand is with wrath, desperation, or pain, the more his writing resembles a straight line that says nothing” (199). Boukova, of course, has no interest at all in straight lines, and one wonders if this deliberate aversion means she too shuns writing from a place of grievance. There is no writing without reading, even when the intended audience is absent, and Van Athen comments on that too: “Reading . . . is a window to the soul. A discovery of our true selves, an investigation into our origins, an understanding of our secret kinships. And of the thousands of words that define us, not a single one has just one paternity” (217). Again with the focus on the power of words and their conglomeration. Van Athen comes across a mysterious figure bearing the name of “Outis,” Greek for “Nobody” (famously a pseudonym of Odysseus). He was born in a village at once Grecian, Bulgarian, and Turkish, a microcosm of the Balkan territories that Boukova’s lens traverses. As he recounts his life, he “told a different version every time, not concerned it might be in conflict with the previous ones” (252). I daydream of Boukova’s craft process, how she tackles revision, if the stories evolve line by line like poems, and whether the fundamental lie-telling of fiction stirs in her a different sort of creative exhilaration than her translations and verse.
We are left with little in the way of summation or benediction, just a dangling carrot that leaves us wanting more from her, and I hope this publication results in enough success in English to spur such a blessing. As the novel draws to a close, I find myself fatigued and a bit lost, but at least Boukova has guided my first steps on the journey of a thousand miles. Is there even a defined endpoint, a destination? It’s the trek that counts, even as the characters themselves voyage across literal great distances, from the treacherous sea to landscapes desolate and wracked with poverty. Where are we all going? It turns out Outis gives us a clear message on this front with little obfuscation, even a titular connection: “As a matter of fact, the direction doesn’t matter at all . . . Regardless of which way you go, you always end up treading on your shadow, as my father used to say. Just as, regardless of which way you turn, you always end up seeing yourself” (264). There’s no help for it but to press on, to walk with purpose, as though free will exists and resides inviolable in human hearts, no matter how seemingly dysfunctional or unlikely or inaccessible. Boukova integrates her Shadow by doing the work, this work, and calls us to do the same.
-- Luke Shuffield is an emerging writer of criticism, poetry, and fiction. His book reviews have appeared in Hobart, BRUISER, Cleaver, and Review 31. He lives in Texas with the two loves of his life: his wife and daughter.
