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Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow

Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow

by Iana Boukova, translated from the Bulgarian by Ekaterina Petrova

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$19.95
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A woman who reads the future in the faces of her lovers, a dice-player whose unfailing luck becomes a curse, a manuscript illuminator who leaves his monastery to become a most fearsome bandit. Set in the Balkans in the nineteenth century, Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow follows eight characters—all defined by a quest, all marked by a hidden, often torturous talent—whose fates become inextricably interwoven. One of the characters, novelist Ian van Athen, may even be the progenitor of all the rest—although reality has a way of defying fiction, and vice versa, and van Athen soon discovers not even he is immune to the undeniable logic of story, to the twists and turns of his own fate…

Rich with classical allusions and nested narratives that recall the fictions of Calvino and Borges, Iana Boukova’s enthralling novel about the pleasures and perils of storytelling appears here in Ekaterina Petrova’s masterful translation, and is imbued with all the beauty and unexpectedness of poetry.

The translation of Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow has been made possible with the financial support of the National Culture Fund of Bulgaria, 2024 Translation Program, and in partnership with the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation.

Additional Book Information

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9798896230830
Pages: 296
Publication Date:

Praise

A novel of searing originality, of magical depths and heights. Its characters and insights into history and human nature have stayed with me indelibly over the years and accompanied me like a waking dream.
—Kapka Kassabova

Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow is an awesome book, an epic travelogue across times and cultures that have shaped a national history. Iana Boukova is a veritable language artist whose novel reads like a giant, seamless prose poem. Ekaterina Petrova’s translation recreates—quite miraculously and breathtakingly—the music and the matter of Boukova’s language, the complex cadences of her operatic sentences, their original rhythms and acoustic reverberations.Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow is a major event in international literature.
—Aron Aji

Masterful, a dazzling feat of mythmaking, told in sentences that come down like gorgeous hammers. lana Boukova's elemental, cradle-to-grave Balkan stories—stories about storytelling itself—brim with history, folklore, fate, and the primordial. Ekaterina Petrova's translation brilliantly carries Boukova's singular voice into an English that's carnal, incantatory, and more than a little dangerous.
—Izidora Angel

Traveling in the Direction of the Shadow is one of the most important, valuable, and beautiful contemporary Bulgarian novels.
—Mitko Novkov

We are simultaneously the spiderweb and the spider, Boukova's poetic work seems to indicate, with its continuous engendering of connections. It transforms the trivial and self-evident, adds itself to the mystery without solving it, aware that it is a part of it, expounding an unrelenting logic.
—Katerina lliopoulou

In inviting us to decipher the complex patterns connecting the lives she describes, while scrupulously avoiding total clarity, Boukova constructs her novel as a tantalising puzzle. For those up to the challenge, this is well worth a read.
—Priya Abularach, Literary Review(UK)

Set in the Balkans during the 19th century, the novel’s eight sections tell the life stories of eight characters in intricately rhythmical, serpentine prose.
—Bela Shayevich, N+1

Eight years in the making, Ekaterina Petrova’s translation preserves the novel’s ballad-like cadence and shifting registers, the precise strangeness of its images, the headlong energy of its long sentences . . . Lyrical, macabre, erudite, and at times even slyly comic, it describes a world in which people step into each other’s shadows and vanish—but the stories continue, seeking new bodies and readers to inhabit them.
—Rosalia Ignatova, Asymptote

A delightful book about the nestled mythologies of storytelling . . . Iana Boukova’s prose offers blistering beauty and a net of history that is sure to entangle readers.
—Michael Welch, Chicago Review of Books

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