Novel
Journey to Oneself
Пътуване към себе си
Blaga Dimitrova · 1965
Synopsis
Without telling anyone, Raina, twenty, throws her suitcase onto a moving lorry and climbs up after it: she is fleeing the Gramovets building site in the Rhodopes, where she has spent two years. The narrative goes back over those years. Having come from Sofia, trained as a pianist, she wanted to forget her family name and became a fitter on the steel frames, in the brigade of bai Krum. Here are the life in the barracks with Dora and the other girls, and her attraction to the architect Vlad Radev, whom the journalist Dimana Dimova contests with her.
Context
The novel was published in 1965; it is the first prose work by its author, who draws on the two years she herself spent on building sites in the Rhodopes. Reissued in 1972, it was translated into English in London as early as 1969, by Cassell, by Radost Pridham, and then into Polish in 1970. The narrative, told by the narrator, starts from the narrator's flight and goes back over the two years that preceded it.
Who it is for
A first-person narrative that goes back over two years on a building site; it has existed in English since 1969, and no French edition has been recorded.
Prizes and reception
Published in English and in Polish only a few years after its release, then reissued in its own country.
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