‘At least twice as long as it needs to be’ – Circus Bulgaria by Deyan Enev

I’m a big fan of flash fiction – hell, I’m a big fan of all fiction – and Circus Bulgaria, Deyan Enev’s collection of short-shorts, appears to hit the ground running with the title story, a poignant snippet about an impoverished former circus employee who’s forced to sell his lion, Caesar, his ‘only family.’  After that, the book sprawls out into a fifty-story long sketch of a Bulgaria populated with escaped lunatics, strippers, gangsters, orphans, peasant prostitutes, crippled beggars – a massive community of extremely sad and lonely people.  Cheerful?  Not really.  Successful?  Again, not really.  The stories themselves are well-crafted and entertaining, but the collection is far too long.  It’s repetitive and unwieldy and definitely less than the sum of its parts – and that’s a real shame, because several of those parts are excellent.

On a story-by-story basis, it works – the writing’s strong and Enev’s got a great eye for the grotesque and the peculiar.  Plus I can see why these stories have been bundled; while they’re not explicitly linked (I only spotted one repeated character), the setting unifies them – the countless nameless villages and hamlets, as well as Enev’s seedy and desperate Sofia, are all full of suicides and rape victims, gangsters and desperate prostitutes, broken people searching for release, whether that comes in the form of love, escape or death.   Many of the brief tales hark back to fairy-tales, with their orphaned children and maidens in distress (‘The Mute, ‘The Orphan’), but the overall context is a post-Communist society that’s been under-represented in English-language literature (as far as I can tell; please head to the comments if you know better) and it’s a pretty sordid glimpse.  It’s not all miserable, either – there are some lovely touching moments, like the old lady who finally finds romance in ‘The Rag And Bone Man’ and the reunited couple in ‘Cardilescu’, and there’s a surreal touch to many of the stories that really appealed to me – check out ‘The Marionette’, with its unfortunate heroine and her pair of long-suffering puppets, and ‘The Small Orange Spot in the Distance’, where a hospitalised dad sneaks out for his son’s birthday and takes him for a ride on a stolen forklift.  But stick them all together, and the whole structure wobbles.

Why’s this?  Well, it really is size that counts in this case –  there’s simply too many stories that are hard to differentiate from one another.  With a collection of fifty stories, I’d venture that you ought to mix it up a little if you want to hold the reader’s attention – vary the story length, the tone, style or the theme of the work to give him a reason to keep turning the pages.  In this case, no matter how good each story might be on its own, it’s just not different enough from its forty-nine companions.  Enev’s got a fairly hefty reputation in his native Bulgaria; this book is his first English translation and it feels like the author or his publishers were simply trying to jam as much of his oeuvre between these two covers as they possibly could, when what it really needed was a very thorough paring back.  It’s not that they’re mismatched – the stories in Circus Bulgaria go very well together – but fifty stories, however short each one may be, is a huge amount to ingest, and I think this collection is at least twice as long as it needs to be.  With these fifty – all of a similar length and mostly dealing with similar topics, in similar locations and in a similar style – the tales begin fading into one another after the first ten or twelve.  I read them all pretty quickly and without interruptions, but if you approached the book more intermittently, I’ll wager you’ll get thoroughly confused as to which story was which, even if you don’t tire of the author’s style.  In my case, reading straight through, the unvarying style began to grate; after a while, the reading felt more like a chore than a pleasurable experience because I thought I already had Enev sussed.  Further reading wasn’t giving me anything new.  It’s a shame, because they’re imaginative and well-crafted tales – but the length of the collection really works against itself.

Any Cop?: Good to dip into now and then, but pretty dull as a straight-through read. If you like dark fairy-tales and you’re not too squeamish, give it a go, but space it out.

Valerie O’Riordan