It can be insightful to choose to see this as the writer singing for her supper, or Scheherezade-like rationing her stories in the interests of self-preservation. The narrative is occasionally (and appropriately, given the nature of these borders) fragmentary. Kassabova has talked privately of losing interest in her own poetry but she couldn’t write an unpoetic line if her life depended on it, and if the poetic charge of the prose occasionally threatens to blur the thesis, the delight in the imagery or the pitch of the metaphor more than compensates. At the airport, ‘vineyards lined the landing strip and the air smelled of petrol and imminent sex’ the excited Russians and other pale northerners are ‘packed off like canned meat to the pulsing resorts’, and there is the smell of ‘ripening figs, of dusty, lusting Nivea cream summer’ where ‘everything tasted like tears’, and wild horses canter along the road: ‘They separated to let my car through and closed behind me like a silent film.’ And if even the least susceptible reader hasn’t by now been enchanted by Kassabova’s prose, this is where resistance becomes futile: every paragraph is embedded with a poem. Thus alerted, and after a brief postcard from Soviet-era Bulgaria, we return with her after a thirty-year absence to Burgas airport with a plane-load of ‘consumer tourists’. The border – specifically the remote borderlands of Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece – is ‘aggressive’, ‘prickly’ it hums ‘with the frequencies of the unconscious’, and it is an invitation, perhaps a dare. Her preface to Border is exemplary in its philosophical and psychological scene-setting. A preface is often little more than the unconsidered fulfilment of a careless expectation, a kind of packaging at best maybe a labelling, at worst a grab for celebrity endorsement, however misguided. Border By Kapka Kassabova Granta A Review by Stephen Keeler
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