Ballantine Books, April 11, 2017.
Four Stars
Kostova has an incredible talent for evoking remote
locations – specifically the small corners of Eastern Europe – in a way that
makes the reader feel as if we can touch, taste and smell everything she is
describing. Her earlier novel, The
Historian, is one of my very favourites, and once again she has inspired me
to travel to the breathtaking locations that her characters are lucky enough to
explore.
In The Shadow
Land, a young American woman named Alexandra has just arrived in Sofia,
Bulgaria to start a new job teaching English. Alexandra had an unconventional childhood
in which her parents lived mostly off the grid, and hiking through the nearby
Blue Mountain trails was their main activity on the weekends. On one such hike,
her teenage brother Jack disappeared from the trail, never to be seen again. Alexandra
has travelled far from home partly to escape this childhood trauma, but also
because Sofia was a city that Jack had longed to visit.
As she is leaving the hotel shortly after her arrival
in Sofia, Alexandra stops to assist an elderly couple into a taxi and
mistakenly ends up with one of their bags. Inside is an ornately carved box
with the name “Stoyan Lazarov” – and inside that are human ashes. Alexandra is
appalled to have ended up with such a personal item, and instructs her own taxi
driver to follow the couple, but they are soon lost in the busy city streets.
The driver, Bobby, agrees to help Alexandra find them, and the two follow a
series of clues that lead them through Sofia and across the Bulgarian
countryside. Bobby seems friendly, but he has his own dark secrets, including
an unnamed threat that follows him around the country.
Along the way, Bobby and Alexandra learn the story of
the dead man, Stoyan Lazarov. They meet with his friends and family, and
discover that he was a talented musician who studied Vivaldi in Austria – but when
he returned to Bulgaria after WWII, he was labelled as an enemy of the
Communist state and sent to a prison labour camp. Stoyan’s story illustrates
the oppression, fear and violence that come from a totalitarian regime, and the
shocking effects that continued for years afterward. These are just a few of
the atrocities of the 20th century, as people turned on each other
in order to survive.
This novel feels like a great story (Stoyan’s)
tangled up inside a mediocre one (Alexandra and Bobby’s madcap caper across the
countryside). Stoyan’s story was heartbreaking and real, while the contemporary
plot line is uneven, improbable and never quite believable. There were also a
few loose ends that were built up and never resolved. I would consider this to
be a literary beach read, where the serious is mixed with the silly. There are
elements of suspense, but they are really secondary to character-building and the
historical setting. While there is quite a lot going on in the plot, it somehow
moves at a slow, meandering pace.
Most of all, I enjoyed the setting, and Kostova’s
ability to showcase the beauty of the Bulgarian landscape and architecture –
she highlights the small details that come together to form a sense of place.
Through Stoyan – and to a lesser extent, Alexandra – there is an exploration of
the inherent goodness of people vs. our capacity for evil. And while there is
always fear in political oppression, we can see here that there is also room
for hope, especially in the creation of art and music.
I received this book from Ballantine Books and
NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
No comments:
Post a Comment