Ein Licht über dem Kopf

Светлинка над главата is translated from German. With this second translation of Dinev's text into Bulgarian, the reader gets to enjoy the beautifully written stories about Eastern European immigrants to the West. Dinev provides the Western reader with a realistic glimpse into the world of the immigrant and his psychology. The stories contain as much the truthful color of the post-communist time in Eastern Europe as they are charged with the poetry of the mundane life of their characters - peasants, gypsies, fortune-tellers, university students. Dinev shows an incredible potential to inject the harsh realistic view with the spirit of his characters. His fiction creates unique scenes that stick with you long after you have put the book down; his style revels the world classic authors. In German literature, the critics already talk about "Dinev style." After reading Ilija Trojanow and Dinev, whose fiction is translated from German, I wonder if the lengthy compound sentences with multiple clauses are something common in contemporary German texts. Sentences that leave the reader breathless and move the story forth in a cinematographically compelling fashion.

Миришеше на ракия, пот и кебапчета, трите миризми на задружността Оркестырыт свиреше фалшиво, но музиката идваше право от сырцата, а те бяха искрени (77).

Hundezeiten: Heimkehr in ein fremdes Land

Yesterday I found this book already translated into Bulgarian. It took only nine (!) years for a Bulgarian publisher to become interested in this account by Ilija Trojanow of the years after 1989. There is too much unpleasant information, I suppose. Or as one of his interviewees says, "[t]his nation does not want to remember. The best thing that can happen to you in politics is to lack biography; biographies tend to only kindle the bad consciousness of the others."