About the novel "To Essay"

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The novel To Essay received a lot of praise in numerous reviews of Bulgarian writers and literary critics, published in Bulgarian media and specialized journals. At its site, the Bulgarian publisher presents a compilation of quotes from these reviews. We provide translation into English of those and few more quotes.

Опитът от Русана Бърдарска | Издателство Жанет 45 (janet45.com)

Quotes from reviews of the novel "To Essay"

This is a monumental creation. The author is a very intelligent woman who writes in an irresistibly absorbing way. We perceive the construction of our own time – we see it through a telescope and under a microscope. The challenges to our intellect are so big that we forget what is what. If Knausgaard were a woman, born in Bulgaria, probably s/he would have written such a book. But isn’t Rusana much more amusing, much more tragic and by far bolder? Check it out for yourself.  Marin Bodakov

Everybody would find something for himself in that kaleidoscope, or, after Bill Bryson, in that not-that-short history of nearly everything. Bardarska takes the reader’s breath away. The interpreters of the post-modern literature will have a lot of work. Sylvia Choleva

In Memory to Memory by Maria Stepanova, Experience by Rusana Bardarska, Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, Oblivion by Sergei Lebedev, Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer – these are books which explore memory from different perspectives. They all relate to the philosophy of memory. Exploring memory is a spontaneous cure for mankind, heavily loaded with twisted reminiscences and unhealthy strive to idealise the past. The authors in this list are amongst the best healers – they know how to cause pain to a precise measure, so that the process of rethinking would be triggered. The authors have something in common – that is the healthy distance from sentimentality, the lack of egocentrism, the feeling of a community in memory. Sylvia Nedkova 

What an exciting project! … It seems nearly impossible to understand what this book is without reading it in its entirety … The translation of the prologue is quite masterful … and is instantly captivating, and [the translators] have succeeded in translating even the etymological elements into English, a real feat. … Gretchen Schmid, Viking Penguin

Such genre does not appear in Bulgarian literature every day. No doubt, the topics are “fundamental” – life, death, time, language, art, love, living and Being, to have and to be, life and existence, personal time and the objective, scientific t; the meticulous documentation of the life and the consciousness of the unexceptional, common human being (after Knausgaard) and the epic scale; our tragic insignificance; the dead scales in which the fragile sense of our life is embedded, and the ominous beauty of the starry sky. Antonia Apostolova

There is no whatsoever doubt that this is a post-modern novel, featuring all playful constructions of post-modern writing. Yanitsa Radeva

Brilliant montage, turning the real, the fictitious and the imaginary into an inseparable mix, into a portrait of not just a woman, but of a contemporary, who tries to find out the links between the past, the present and the future. Brilliant narrating skill – the big “autobiographic” story about this contemporary is by far more engaging than a crime fiction. The mastery of Bulgarian language is astonishing. This is one of the books with most beautiful and rich language which I have ever read. The reflections about death are no way inferior to the philosophy of Philippe Ariès, and those about the life and the Being of woman are equal to Le Deuxième Sexe de Simone de Beauvoir. We must be aware that this is a very important book, written by a Bulgarian, by a cosmopolite, by an artist who has outgrown the “cultural vacuum” and whose portrait hides many, many more secrets. Georgi Tsankov

This is an impressive – in terms of volume and concept – book which explores time. Time is “narrated” via the personal stories of the characters, set in the grand narrative. It is about the existentialist human time, but as well about the concept of time in physics, philosophy and history. Experience can be read not only as a novel, but as documentary non-fiction, too, as it comprises philosophical essays and science articles. The text explores death, time, economics, love, memory and Cosmos. The reader dives deep into the human experience. The large-scale, absorbing narrative, at times takes the shape of a family epos, to bounce back to post-modern play with genres and themes. Experience brings in one structure everything – a huge world, stuffed to explosion. The book tries to tell about everything, which engages human attention, without discriminating between the big and the small, the important and the insignificant, the main characters and the secondary ones, the book tries to contain the whole world. And Rusana Bardarska manages this material extraordinarily well – she narrates in an engaging and erudite manner. One may consider this novel as a fundamental text about the female viewpoint at history. But as much more, too. Olya Stoyanova

The book can be read as an existentialist and philosophical novel, or as a strident feminist manifesto, or as a novel about our Bulgarian past and capitalist present, as an attempt to probe emigration as a search for not only more affluent, but as well more meaningful life. Krassimir Lozanov

Experience leans to a novel not only because of its impressive volume. The chapters are tightly packed with fully literary bondages – with loose plot and autobiographical threads, with permanent characters, whom a “classical reader” would enjoy, with reoccurring symbols and leitmotifs, with serene humour, subtle irony and wonderful stylistic experiments in all registers of the comic. Yet, the fundament, holding the text together and making it a novel, is the in-depth, pivotal “story”, in which the (hi)story of the individual, the intimate and the (auto)biographical, entangle with and echo into the (hi)story of human being in general and of the mankind. Personal time and space codes settle down into the universal Time and Space, in Cosmos and beyond. Mariya Shiryaeva 

The book is huge as concept, quality and implementation. There is hell of a lot of everything, but when you turn the last page, you realise that there is no single superfluous word. Experience is a phenomenon in Bulgarian literature; it is impossible to “retell” or summarise it. This is an ambitious literary-philosophical text, a post-modern novel, written by an erudite and respectably intelligent writer. Tanya Ivanova

Sweeping and epic in spirit and content, Experience offers different reading approaches. The book can be read as an existentialist and philosophical novel, or as a strident feminist manifesto, or as a novel about our Bulgarian past and capitalist present, as an attempt to probe emigration as a search for not only more affluent, but as well more meaningful life. Very generous in topics, very playful, subtly ironic, wittily mystificating, uncompromisingly bold and provocative post-modern literature, which shocks, intrigues, moves. Krassimir Lozanov

I am still wondering what is more in this book – the states of the human being or the cosmic dust? The big literature in this book starts with the little girl from the Prologue. The original concept about the androgyne in the modern world is brilliantly defended. This is an admirably female book – a contribution to the knowledge about the spirit and the soul of the intelligent woman, who knows how to break free from the centuries-old guardianship of man, of man, who has conceived the world and the words to represent this world to himself. Zlatko Angelov

There are masterfully depicted episodes, where you find contained emotion and high literature. We can be certain that Experience is a first book of its kind in Bulgarian literature as it mixes extensively autobiography, auto-fiction and essays. Though such literature is still rare on our literary scene, it seems that globally, more and more often writers combine personal historicism with that of a higher rank (ex. In Memory to Memory by Maria Stepanova.) Another development is the attempts to harness non-fiction in the elemental force of aesthetics. Ivan Petrov

This is an attempt to give an authentic voice to the contemporary European, despite the stereotyped history. The author tries to look ahead at the “wonderful new world” (yes, I am ironic, so is the author) in which our children will live. Our children live and think beyond national mythologies and belongings to patriotisms.

This multi-genre text elaborates on human reposals; it tells about authentic existentialist pains and fears, but as well about the trans-human (cf. Luc Ferry) The reader is invited to reflect about our human measures, about those “vague” emotions, about the transcendent – that is to say, about the intrinsic territories of art. But above all, Experience is a novel about our “mellow, inaccurate, quaint and ruthlessly irreversible human time.” Both in narrative chapters, and in those dominated by philosophical reflection, Rusana Bardarska ponders the world beyond human categories, beyond mythologies and civilizational markers. 

All and all, the whole book comments and fictionalizes the world with succinct, secular irony. The text bounces boldly away from storyline structure and experiments in philosophical prose, without, however, losing the gravity force to fiction and the fictitious. Ina Ivanova

It has never happened to me before – to read a book for such a long time. But “Experience” is so “delicious”, dense, honest… it is like sharing a life. This is an authentic, multi-genre, experimental readable, brilliantly written, comprehensive novel, which I recommend with great pleasure, because all our life is there, it all its dimensions..Svetlozar Zhelev

Rusana Bardarska uses skillfully semantic linkages and kinships, the metaphorical potential of words and diverse phraseology. Mastering other languages allows her to dig into the roots of Bulgarian language and to bring out its somewhat forgotten competencies. Experience demonstrates rich erudition in the area of humanities. The attentive reader will soon realize that the author tries out a conceptual allusion with the original essence of the essayistic genre and Montaigne’s Essays, while highlighting the blood link of the essay genre with the literary instinct in principle. Andrey Zahariev

Very rarely it occurs a novel which would cover many decades and would analyse the changes and developments brought underway. Rusana Bardarska is a peculiar case of an author who is able to speak about her own book, taking distance as literary critic. Svetoslav Todorov

Words by the two English translators

Christopher Buxton, writer and translator:

In 2020 a best-selling book got all Bulgaria talking. Experience (or To Essay) by Rusana Bardarska was published by Zhanet 45 – a publishing house with a well-founded reputation for supporting the very best Bulgarian writers, including Georgi Gospodinov, Milen Ruskoff and Kapka Kasabova. Bardarka skillfully manages the hairpin bends of a post-modernist structure to convey a unifying human viewpoint through shifting perspectives, contexts and genres. Non-linear, yet gripping, the novel affirms the positive force of human creativity, the urge to locate, release and transmit the stories hitherto suppressed, by patriarchal culture and language.

The extraordinarily inclusive account of life, time, space and death begins in the main street in Lom, a small Bulgarian town on the banks of the Danube, where in the eyes of the child, death only happens on a Sunday. This opens one of the recurring themes of the book, our inability to talk about death of loved ones, death of a mother tongue, death of the entire human race.

The backdrop shifts from childhood in the impoverished but cosy security of a provincial backwater, to the elite Plovdiv high school with its threatening Communist regime, to the struggle to survive in post-communist chaos, and finally to relocation and material comfort in Brussels at the heart of the EU. Seen from so many perspectives and shifting time frames, it is a journey that allows us to question the very core of identity. A polyglot Bulgarian, proud of her history and language now lives in a country with little history and contested languages, working for an organization, whose aim is to overarch all traditional cultural conflicts. Along with our inability to talk about death, language becomes another key theme, both on a personal level, and in the larger context of human identity and survival.

How does communication work between a woman and her lover in a language that is neither his nor her mother tongue? How does a woman communicate the fear she feels gazing at the starry void, over her lover’s shoulder through the bedroom window. How does she negotiate the paradoxes of time and space? How will her voice and the voice of countless women be heard?

Rusana Bardarska wears her intelligence on her sleeve. Her references shift from Quantum Physics, string theory, Marxist economics, postmodern literary theory, ethical philosophy to popular culture – even The Good Place. She is on Christian name terms with Montaigne. She has opinions, and one of the great strengths of this book are the hackles her opinions raise with the reader. That is all to the good, in that this is a book that will promote hot debate. It will not be the last word. Hers is a voice from that border land, a borderland between language and culture, a land of runaways whom understandably many patriotic Bulgarian residents wish to ignore. But from that borderland, one can perceive not just the future of individual nations, but that of the entire human race.

Zornitsa Hristova, writer, translator and publisher:

“Experience” (or To Essay) is a composite book, much as experience itself is composite. Each chapter is a layer which brings a new meaning to what it is to have lived – from childhood encounters with death in a little town by the Danube to the inside story of trying to make sense of time, the economy of everyday life set against violent economic storms, the imaginary demise of the Self as viewed from the eyes of a loved one, the intricacies of love and writing in today’s virtual world (told by a female Cyrano), family history from a female perspective, immigration and belonging, gender issues, the mind against the machine, the Self in language, art and science, among many things. A small girl travels around the (desktop) globe with her paralyzed Grandma; a woman loses control over the wording of her illicit affair; a rape buried deep in family history has unexpected consequences generations later; a stopped watch, a rammed bike, an empty box of chocolate eggs, a boy who refuses to speak and give hugs. A lunar landscape with a little figure in it.

None of this is straightforward. Much as Montaigne’s original essays, whose charm is in the mix between the strive to depth and the candour of imperfection, the chapters often evade their stated purpose. They also tend to defy the impulse to be rearranged, in the reader’s mind, as to make a single storyline – facts do recur, some confirming prior evidence, some not. Identification is invited – then sidestepped, subtly, as the narrator’s voice changes once again. And yet identification does happen, again and again, as the characters face obstacles that are shared by many and commented upon by few.

The book is also equally turned towards the Eastern and the Western reader. As the life of the narrator unfolds on both sides of the East-West divide, it requires – and provides – the necessary touchstones of understanding for both audiences. Like a mixed-marriage person used to anticipating what one part of her family will not get about the other, the author has provided a buffet of key details that widen the perspective without making you feel you have stepped into alien territory. Some of these are explained in footnotes – the voice of the book is confident enough not to simplify its tune for fear of losing a tone-deaf reader. It’s also confident enough to be opinionated – which brings life and vigor to the reflective pieces, inviting a heated internal argument.

„Еxperience” is a word naturally turned backwards. And yet, it carries the same root as “to experiment”, to attempt, essayer, to step into the unknown. What brings the different layers of “Experience” together is the self, the narrator’s voice unafraid of looking into the future – and standing by the reader against the frightful “maybe”.