Cultural centres and embassies will organise a series of events to accompany the Europe Readr platform.
Sofia with Alexander Shpatov
On Sofia Day, celebrated on 17 September, we organised a two-hour guided literary walk around the town's landmarks important for Bulgarian culture and literature with the Bulgarian author Alexander Shpatov, who is participating in the Europe Readr project. The walk was guided by Shpatov himself, who also works as a tour guide around Sofia and whose book #LiveFromSofia included in the Europe Readr platform depicts the town and its particularities. At the end, the thirty participants were gifted the book Live from Sofia and invited to peruse the Europe Readr digital library.
‘Gast Groeber’s short stories in Every Day Just Hides Another put the focus on characters that increasingly distance themselves from their usual surroundings. The story ‘A Village Idyll’ describes the life of a man who has been ostracized by the villagers ever since he ran over a boy with his car. Groeber smartly shows how the real circumstances of the accident, which have an essential influence on our moral judgement, are no longer taken into consideration at all once the culprit is found. Groeber’s description of the threat to the individual by the Others is also cleverly done: in these stories, it is never clear from the start whether the threat is merely imaginary or very real. Interpersonal relations float between the superficial and a precarious intimacy.
What should be highlighted in Every Day Just Hides Another is the obvious desire to achieve a consistent topical conception that only a few texts don’t follow. Groeber also aims at a decidedly literate, yet always natural language, which is quite an achievement given the limited stock of role models. The attempt for example to construe a character perspective using only impersonal phrases and infinitives that the author makes in ‘The Unbearable Weight of Waiting’ is utterly successful.’