An enveloping, cinematic, and richly layered saga, populated by fantastical characters, untamed spirits such as the zuli.
Roxana Dumitrache
In a university campus haunted by crimes and assaults, a love story begins. He is a student at the Conservatory, she studies Literature. But what lies between them is not only music and books—it is also a past. Amid intellectual aspirations and social fears, people and events from distant times make their way in. Each episode of love is symbolically tied to the archaic history of the Romanians: Danubian migrations, the cult of Dionysus, Bulgarian mercenaries, the mythical Caucaland, as well as archaic gods and the spirits of a vanished world. All of these form the backdrop of a love story that gradually turns into a history of identity.
“To love means to find out who you are.” (Bulgarian Nose)
Among all the events that mix tribes and languages, there are at least two certainties that history should take into account: the resilience of a name that sustained the Balkan scaffolding (the name of the Bulgarians) and the Romanian language. The novel’s love story rests on these two ideas.
At the same time, the novel is an intimate story of coming of age—personal, mythical, and historical—seen as a perpetual flight and a return to the self. If Ferenike spoke of the demon of death, Bulgarian Nose brings to the forefront the demon of love. The personal trauma in Ferenike and the national myths in Bulgarian Nose are two sides of the same coin. In the same way, communism and archaic history become parallel systems of control and escape.
“Bulgarian Nose encompasses two years of my life. At its core, it tells the story of an encounter with love, always connected to the affirmation of identity. Love means abandonment—that is, a long process of arrivals and departures. My identity is illustrated here through eleven histories of the Romanians, of their journeys south and north of the Danube. For me, self-legitimation involves an existential map and several pressing themes: migration, communism, the marginalization of women, national origin. This is the context of every human being—one you become acutely aware of only when you fall in love. As I write in the novel, to love means to find out who you are.”
— Doina Ruști
