Dimitré Dinev’s monumental novel “Time of the Brave” | EUROtoday

Imagine: Somewhere in Austria, removed from the new wheels of historical past, a Soviet and an American army man stand along with a Bulgarian canine and its proprietor, a Wehrmacht soldier who miraculously survived his personal execution. The bullet within the German’s head took away his reminiscence and gave him the flexibility to imagine a unique id. That’s value quite a bit in these instances. The males let the canine struggle towards others and wager on who will win. This creates a forbidden fraternization. You can calculate what number of joints must coincide for this combination.

Anyone who speaks of the polycrisis with sociological consciousness immediately intentionally describes the current as notably loopy. The incontrovertible fact that the story went haywire instantly earlier than is shortly forgotten. It was truly the “age of extremes” (Eric Hobsbawm): whether or not the incomprehensible lies in battle, totalitarianism and breaks in civilization themselves or of their unusual synchronicity – particularly within the reminiscences of the individuals who skilled them, one after the opposite – is anybody’s guess.

Dimitré Dinev was born in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, in 1968. Since the autumn of the Iron Curtain, he has lived in Vienna, round a thousand kilometers up the river, free of Bulgarian communism, one of many harshest within the Eastern Bloc. His debut “Engelszungen” from 2003 is in regards to the trials and tribulations of individuals in European historical past. In the case of Bulgaria, that is notably worthwhile for a German-speaking readership that always (if in any respect) seems to be in the direction of the southeast with disinterest. He waited greater than twenty years for a brand new novel and, it’s mentioned, spent round 13 years writing it.

The result’s a monumental work that’s nearly 1,200 pages lengthy. It covers nearly an entire century, from the eve of the First World War to the current. It’s about three households, Bulgarians, Roma and Austrians, and their paths by way of the intense Europe of their time and to one another. Because the narrative arises from the bricolage of those biographies, and actually they’re all interconnected. This constellation already made the novel predestined for the Austrian Book Prize, which Dinev additionally gained final 12 months. And deserved it.

The motion begins in 1912: Eva needs to kill herself within the Danube, however the soldier Alois stops her. Later she meets the fisherman Xaver. Her daughter Angela – now fascism is raging – marries right into a household of bakers, and her son-in-law Helmut goes to battle as an enthusiastic Nazi, from which he by no means returns. Leopold Gruber confronted the identical destiny when he was shot in Bulgaria, however he survived with a bullet in his head – from then on as Medscho.

Together with the shepherdess Neda, he fathers Wihra, who later turns into an agent of the Bulgarian secret service and even later the nurse Jowa, who takes care of her father. He, now as Meto, got here to Austria below Helmut’s id and have become Angela’s husband. Then there’s Rom Barko, who’s first imprisoned within the Bulgarian penal camp Belene, the place he joins a gaggle of anarchists and later settles down together with his household. All of those characters additionally stay in their very own previous: everyone seems to be the kid of their time, however above all of their dad and mom.

Taming such an enormous community with out it fraying on all sides is an nearly megalomaniacal endeavor. Dinev succeeds, above all because of his motives: Eva as soon as needed to take her personal life on the Danube, however then discovered a motive to proceed dwelling on the banks of the Danube. The river turns into the leitmotif, the place the place the characters search recommendation.

However, the novel’s weaknesses are additionally noticeable. Although the creator develops an enormous ensemble of characters (as soon as Eva says about somebody that she has forgotten his title – me too!, the reader thinks), he needs to make all of them bearers of humanism: everybody has their quirks. Neda struggles, Xaver stays silent, and Meto’s son Bruno prefers to speak to the workers at events. Everyone is united by their outsider standing. There is hardly a society wherein these figures exist; they at all times distance themselves from it. Power is corrupted for them, no matter whether or not they seem as monks, corrupt communists or Nazi followers.

Above all, it is about intercourse, torturously numerous it, and in such abundance which you can’t ignore it nonchalantly. The drive appears to be the motivation of each act, its execution of voyeuristic curiosity for the narrator. Sometimes it is simply annoying, in sordid dialogues (“I’m just one cock from top to bottom”), typically grotesque when Neda tries to cope with the ache of separation from Meto with a wood dummy penis, typically irreverent: Even a focus camp survivor on the loss of life march simply thinks about how he can restore his “masculine dignity”. Sex alone has metaphysical content material.

To be astonished by this isn’t prudery, however reasonably a sense of bewilderment at this narrowness. It additionally would not match with the narrator’s in any other case childlike look. One can solely speculate how a lot potential the creator has misplaced by way of this fixation, apparently as a pose for an uncompromisingly understood naturalism.

In any case, Dinev is just not afraid of stereotypes. That’s sufficient for the novel’s performative humanism, nevertheless it typically turns into a platitude: in some awkward dialogue that comes throughout as mischievous at greatest, however typically kitschy and intentional, in some anticipated twists and characters, like that of the hippie Ronny, who reads Camus within the lavatory and desires to journey to India and later turned an SPÖ communal philistine, or these of the second-rate communist apparatchiks with yellow enamel and grey fits. It can also be unavoidable that this polyphony typically turns into erratic and repetitive when the narrative needs to be introduced collectively by way of all of the secondary scenes and characters.

Some issues within the novel seem to be rumors, and the narrator together with his expansive gesture additionally appears – a bit like the entire textual content – lovingly out of time. He factors the finger at many issues for the reader: an aphorist on the verge of changing into a saying, a grasp of the “because”, which is adopted, drunk with fact, by a knowledge that typically is none in any respect on second studying. These quirks would not have been mandatory, as a result of the size already calls for sufficient of the reader.

On the floor, the novel seems to be exemplary historic fiction. Turning to these within the center or again row of these dwelling with you and thus placing the highly effective folks within the entrance row and “history” (the singular one, thoughts you) into the background is outdated literary hat. We know this from Walter Scott, Lev Tolstoy or Henryk Sienkiewicz.

The textual content additionally has to cope with narrated tropes from modern European historical past, the battle between the 1968 technology and their Nazi dad and mom, the Iron Curtain or denunciation in totalitarianism. The age of extremes additionally prevailed within the psychological periphery of Europeans, in Bulgarian communism, within the lives of the Roma and on the Eastern European paths of transformation.

Dinev is a grasp at closing circles, and you’ll admire him for it, as that is the place his narrative shines brightest. It’s straightforward to see that there are maybe too many circles. He additionally handles melodrama and mysticism with virtuosity, for instance in Xaver’s octopus tooth, which makes one invisible. The widest circle closes on the finish: Eva’s great-granddaughter – additionally Eva – seems to be along with “Aunt Jowa” at present-day Austria, at xenophobia and anti-humanism. How useless every part appears when everybody was truly completely different in a earlier life.

Dimitré Dinev: “Time of the brave”. Novel. No & But, Zurich 2025. 1152 p., hardcover, €38.