To close the pain in jewelry
« And our bed is greenery » by Violeta Radkova
« Jeanette 45 », 2024
I love when I read a book, to think about the roots of its text. Not only for the author planted by the author, but also for that direct agglutination, which allows the reader by reading to add to these roots (and to the boundaries of the obvious) new semantic shades. And in this sense – I especially like books that do not allow a wide interpretive approach at the same time, but also do not close the horizon in listed topics.
| They stimulate and scatter: candle wick, but also a wick for a blast. « And our bed has become greenery » by Violeta Radkova is just such a book in which the external and inner times, the great and the small permanently intersect in man and the human, remain connected until the green wick (by Dylan Thomas, whose verse is the motto of the novel). The green wick, which grows irresistibly, searches for roads through the vulnerable and covers with it all fragility – it scatters roots, but also illuminates. |
In the Bulgarian language there is an expression of inspiration and incitement – I am igniting someone’s wick. Writing Violeta Radkova is exactly this tickle, which brings confusion that everything is possible: having a few lives to catch up, to catch up for a short while, and the longing for one always to give excuses for the other. Their joined vessels follow a historical and geographical routes, but in the novel, both history and geography are just a background where the personal is happening. It is a gravitational center, but not with the interpretations of the Renaissance and Romanticism. Violeta Radkova’s man is the author even when he is illiterate, Because he is a creator of sense and intuition.
Acoustics for the lost homeland
A small God, who in his own image and likeness seeks his reciprocal muse. That is why nothing is final in the novel: the names of people and people change in the name of something, the dead have never died, but the living have not lived. The philosophical thread of the plot alternates enthusiasm with melancholy, a homeland with a enslavement, a native place with a receiving country, patriarchy with feminism, rigidity with modernity.
The alternation is not linear, but in parallel, as if these pages are coming to remind us that everything that happens to us is happening to someone else at this moment somewhere else in the world. In this sense, no one is alone and no pain is with a final owner. However, the humanism in Violeta Radkova’s novel is not empathy, it is not in the experience. It is in the bright way of acceptance – the other and the otherness, as you accept yourself and your own.
Everyone fights their pain as they can, and there is no right or wrong way to do so. Only the way you can live with.
And more:
The pearl is actually an ark in which an enemy, the invader, lies. This is the triumph of nature. To close the pain in jewelry. Why is she doing this? Why does he want to sell us a parasite as a preciousness? Why should a worm lie in the core of the pearl? Isn’t that weird? Isn’t it crazy? Isn’t this the miracle of nature, John? Imagine that this could also apply to me. Yes I can create something beautiful from my wound.
The stigmatized Bulgarian
The topic of pain is actually a problematization of transformation. Of the overlapping in man, to be able to build among the ruins, to create from the working material of death. If I have to answer the question of the novel for what it is for « and our bed is greenery, » I would say that this is a novel for children and parents, and the ways they come as such. This is also a novel about the loneliness of the different, but also about the metaphysics of love. But most of all, I would define this strong debut of Violeta Radkova, using her words – a novel about close breathing. And in parallel breathing is the meaning of all human counting.
