The English Neighbor is the incredibly funny and entertaining
story of the clash and fusion between cultures in today’s age of
globalization.
The story is set in the fictitious
village of Plodorodno (“fertile” in English). With Bulgaria’s opening to
the world, many of its residents have left abroad to earn money, and
others hope to win from the lottery instead of start tilling the fertile
land nearby. One fine day, a true Englishman, John, buys a house in the
village and settles there. He is a retired chemical engineer, yearning
for the tranquility of a rural life in the countryside. He has chosen
Bulgaria because he came to the Bulgarian seaside several times and has
even taken a Bulgarian language course. He dreams of tilling the land on
his won, of planting tomatoes and peppers, and breeding his own cattle.
And while John is delighted to go deeper into the joys of Bulgarian
rustic life, his Bulgarian neighbor Nikolai has renamed himself to
Nottingham Forest and has even named his cattle after world football
stars.
“The idea for this book struck me quite by chance in a
conversation with a man from the village of Kamchia near Varna, Veshim
explains. He told me that an Englishman had settled in a neighboring
village. This was some 6 or 7 years ago, when a lot of Englishmen
started purchasing houses in Bulgaria. So, the subject of the English
Queen was a hardworking guy who bought a tractor and started tilling the
land while locals preferred to stay in the pub, to drink beer and to
try and talk him out of farming. However, the Englishman was unable to
understand why they are unwilling to toil in the fields and consider
agriculture a lost cause. And finally he proves them that one can make
profits from agriculture. This story never came out of my mind. So I
told it in various forms – first in a feuilleton in the Starshel
newspaper, then in a radio play on the Bulgarian National Radio, in a
screenplay for a TV series and finally, when the realization of the
series was delayed, I wrote the novel. The humor in the book derives
from the encounter between two clashing views of life. I seem to have
felt something very important and that is why I managed to paint a vivid
and interesting picture, but my sense of humor is well-meant. I do not
issue judgments, I do not reproach one character or another, this is not
a satirical novel. It is a comic book and it is deeply Bulgarian. It is
a novel about us, Bulgarians. The Englishman is simply the looking
glass in which we see our reflection”, the writer says.
The
English Neighbor shows us some very vivid characters. The mayor, for
example, has quite original ideas for investments such as making a
replica of Hyde Park or a golf course on Bulgarian soil. At the end of
the book, we understand that three Japanese families who know how to
make the world-famous Bulgarian yoghurt have arrived to live in the
village of Plodorodno so Bulgarian and Japanese children as well as
John’s grandchildren will be studying at the local school. And also the
grandchildren of the mayor from his son’s marriage with a Vietnamese
woman. On the other hand, locals live on four continents. “The world is a
global village!”, the mayor of the village of Plodorodno recaps.
Начало