Narrative
Before I Was Born and Other Stories
Преди да се родя и след това
Ivailo Petrov · 1968
Synopsis
The speaker is not yet born: he tells, as a mocking witness, how his grandparents, poor peasants full of pretensions, decide to marry off their son Petar to have “two more hands”. In a village of Dobruja, the matchmakers' manoeuvres then begin, Gotcho Patladjana foremost among them, along with the haggling over the dowry, then an abduction that takes the wrong girl: it is poor Bera who is brought back instead of the rich one. The second part follows the child once born.
Context
The book appeared in 1968 and brings together two stories, one before the birth of the narrator, the other after; the action of the first is set at the time of the September 1923 uprising. The second draws on what the author himself experienced as a soldier. Turned towards the village of the past, it no longer makes it a lost paradise, and thus parodies the nostalgia of the rural prose of the sixties. The author later reworked it under a title that extends the “after” up to his own death.
Who it is for
A narrative of about one hundred and eighty pages, funny and ironic; it has existed in French since 1994, in Marie Vrinat's translation.
Prizes and reception
Presented as a preparatory stage for the author's great novel, it was a considerable success in Bulgaria.
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