The first Bulgarian private detective is trying to solve his first case in the mid-to-late nineties in Sofia- the disappearance of a teenager. That is probably the best way to describe what the book is - plot wise anyway. It also is inadequate to explain what it really is.

Yes - there is a detective. Kinda. He had had never had any cases, works as a translator to make ends meet and has no clue how to be a detective (but he had read all the American novels on the topic so he thinks he knows). And a girl needs to be found. But as is often the case, the search is a vehicle for a story - the story of Bulgaria in the late 90s. Or parts of it anyway.

The author named every character in a way that shows either their character or their occupation (or the opposite of them in a few cases - and it does matter if the name matches or not) - easy enough to do when playing with family names. And he imbued most of the characters that we see more than once with the collective characters of the groups in that time. The book is full of references and allusions and small throw backs to the times I grew up in - and it made me laugh in places that were not even close to funny.

And what makes this novel work for me also makes it untranslatable. The names probably can find their counterparts but the rest? Here is a small example. There are two words for a policeman in Bulgarian (a third one means "cop"): one derives from the Latin Militia and the second from the German Polizei. Before the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the system, the Latin-based word was used to identify the police in Bulgaria. The German-derived one was used after that, the other becoming an insult for some and a way to show that you miss the past for others. So the usage for one or the other is telling you a lot about the person talking - even more in the 90s when the novel is set than now. And that's one of the small things - there is hundreds of those references, not to mention the references to practices and actions which will need a note under the text if you have never heard of them.

It is the kind of novels that come out from a shared history - the history of the newly rich and the Yugoslavian embargo, the story of a country trying to change and getting nowhere fast (and moving too fast in some places). It is all the collective memories of a generation condensed into a story - and as such it is exactly what I was looking for when I picked up the book. ( )