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My earliest reading memory
I was taught to read quite early, at five or six, probably so that I would sit quietly and not be a nuisance to the adults. And it worked. Once I’d entered a book, I didn’t want to come out. I remember how Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl turned my heart upside down. I was living with my grandmother at the time, and I cried under the blanket, terrified that one day she, too, would die.
My favourite book growing up
I read greedily and indiscriminately, picking books at random from my parents’ library. Thomas Mayne Reid’s adventure novels were favourites, especially The Headless Horseman. Jack London’s Martin Eden, too. Clearly, the idea of being both a hero and a writer appealed to me. Writers were not usually heroes. I also loved a textbook on criminology, which explained how to make invisible ink, what traces criminals leave behind, and so on – matters of extraordinary importance to any 10-year-old boy.
The author that changed me as a teenager
All novels that contained erotic scenes – because of the acute shortage of eroticism in the late socialist Bulgaria of the 1980s. Also around that time I discovered JD Salinger. I reread his stories obsessively, without being sure I understood everything. At 17, I decided to write him a letter, trying to provoke him into breaking his silence. Of course, I never sent it. Much later, that story found its way into my memoir, The Story Smuggler.
The writer who changed my mind
Jorge Luis Borges. When the first translations of his work appeared in Bulgaria, I was 21, shortly before the wall fell – a crucial moment. It was as if I suddenly understood what literature is capable of, and how there are no real borders between genres. I had an exhilarating sense of freedom, but also of a shared secret. Memory, erudition, heart, science and myth – all of it was there.
The book that made me want to be a writer
The poems of two tragic Bulgarian poets: Peyo Yavorov and Nikola Vaptsarov. I began writing poetry in secret. Later, I was found out.
The book I reread
Homer’s Odyssey. We probably mentioned it or read parts of it at school, and perhaps that was what put me off it for so long. After turning 40, I began to truly understand it – and to reread it, seeing it differently each time. The theme of the father increasingly drew me in, the bond between father and son. Then there’s the great theme of return – not only the return home but also to the past – and memory, the question of who remembers us unconditionally and recognises us, like the dog. In my last two novels I have been in dialogue with this book again and again.
The book I discovered later in life
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. It always stood out on my bookshelf, but for years I never reached for it. I imagined it would be very gloomy, heavy, full of endless reflection. When I read it in my late 40s it wasn’t love at first sight, but the story didn’t let me go. I love books I can converse with, even enter into Socratic arguments with. It was very important to me while I was writing Time Shelter. You think you write in solitude, but in truth you are in constant dialogue with other books and authors.
The book I am currently reading
The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk. A powerful novel that seems, like Borges’s maps, to try to contain the world – and time – at a scale of 1:1. A book for slow winter reading.
