But I am not sure what aspects of it qualify as “magical realism.” The scenes in which the two central characters swim around a submerged church in a river do not qualify as “magical,” suspending the rules of ordinary reality.
Novelist Michele Roberts, one of the judges of the 2012 contest, said Penkov’s story successfully “united personal and political life, joining inner and outer worlds through its deployment of different kinds of realism: social and magical and folkloric.” I recognize the “social,” even the “folkloric,” realism of the story.
Unless Penkov was in love with a woman, from which he was kept apart by geographical or political distance, it is not clear how he “injected” his own life into the story. Penkov said he wanted to “inject” his own life into what he called a “sprawling” story-to write about himself living in America far away from the people he loved. This is further supported by review comments that Penkov’s “East of the West” is a “primer on Bulgarian history” and a story “about a Bulgarian village divided by war.” In an article on Penkov’s win by Alison Flood in The Guardian, Penkov was quoted as saying that the story was inspired by an article he once read about two villages-one in Bulgaria and one just across the border in Serbia-that held a reunion every five years because 70 years earlier they were once a single village in Bulgaria. I suspect what won over the judges in the 2012 BBC National Short Story contest-the year the contest termed itself an “international” competition and allowed entries from around the world-is reflected by the fact that “East of the West” is ostensibly more about a political place than a person, as indicated by Miroslav Penkov’s decision to subtitle his collection, in which the winning story is the title piece, A Country in Stories. Miroslav Penkov, “East of the West”: BBC Winner, 2012
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