Review of “Is There Anybody to Love You” by Kalin Terziyski

There’s nothing beautiful about the city of Sofia in Is There Anybody to Love You? by Kalin Terziyski (Dalkey Archive Press, December 2018; translated by David Mossop), a collection of short stories set in the Bulgarian capital. “The houses in Sofia are ugly because they’re old,” thinks the protagonist of the story ‘The Beggar’. “Their age doesn’t do anything to enhance their beauty, just destroys their rendering.”

In the title story it is constantly raining, while in ‘Problems with the Cleaner’, “the stifling heat of August lies as heavy as an old carpet.” The rain is so strong in the story ‘A Stroll through Space with Slight Deviations in Time’ that it seems “as if a cursed and evil decision had been made to engulf us in water.” Still, the heavy rainfall can also serve to refresh the air. After a downpour nearly inundates the city, “the sun even comes out—a strange, droll sort of evening sun—just before it hides behind the mountain peak of Vitosha to go on to someplace else.”

The unique, often eccentric characters in these stories come to life, if rarely a pleasant life, in the space of just a few pages. These are the overlooked residents of Sofia—beggars, prostitutes, adulterers, thugs, murderers, gypsies, and disgruntled citizens in search of understanding and meaning in their downtrodden lives.

In ‘The Case of the Necktie,’ a private detective is preoccupied trying to find his favorite tie when he is hired to take photographs of a cheating husband. This sort of job is so tedious and banal, the detective thinks, that he would prefer to sell lottery tickets at the train station. “At least that way his life would be filled with more vivid impressions and passions, and he would never be bored.” Little does the detective know that a surprising discovery awaits him in the case.

A journalist is hired to write a travel article in the story ‘Eighty Thousand Leagues under the Ladies’ Market.’ It is supposed to be some sort of “lifestyle article” but did that mean it was to be aimed at the “nouveau rich who dreamed of being isolated from the world?” The journalist heads for the biggest of Sofia’s outdoor markets and takes a seat at a small cafe. “If you sit aimlessly for a few hours in an aimless place, you begin to discover strange things,” he thinks. Through the journalist’s observations we see the gypsies, the Arabs, the madmen, and the market shoppers. Nearby is the closed, nearly sterile Hali market but the journalist realizes “there is nothing decaying [there] and so there is no life.” The journalist leaves the “calm and cheery consumer wilderness” and returns to the Ladies’ Market, where the madmen reign.

There’s something about this story that serves as a metaphor for Sofia itself. You could focus on the glitz and glamour and the nouveau rich, but in these quickly read stories the author introduces us into the lives of the real residents of Sofia’s streets.

Kalin Terziyski was born in 1970 in Sofia, Bulgaria. He earned a doctorate in medicine and practiced psychiatry for several years before becoming a writer. He is the author of several collections of stories and two novels. The short story collection Is There Anybody to Love You, originally published in 2009, is the first of his works to be translated into English. Terziyski is one of the winners of the 2011 European Union Prize for Literature.