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Stork Mountain: A Novel, by Miroslav Penkov
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In Stork Mountain, a young Bulgarian immigrant returns to the country of his birth in search of his grandfather, who suddenly and unexpectedly cut all contact with the family three years ago. The trail leads him to a village on the border with Turkey, a stone's throw away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains − a place of pagan mysteries and black storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, possessed by Christian saints, men and women dance barefoot across live coals in search of rebirth. Here in the mountains, he gets drawn by his grandfather into a maze of half-truths. And here, he falls in love with an unobtainable Muslim girl. Old ghosts come back to life and forgotten conflicts blaze anew until the past surrenders its shameful secrets.
Stork Mountain is an enormously charming, slyly brilliant debut novel from an internationally celebrated writer. It is a novel that will undoubtedly find a home in many readers' hearts.
- Sales Rank: #234633 in Books
- Published on: 2016-03-15
- Released on: 2016-03-15
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.64" h x 1.49" w x 5.75" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 448 pages
Review
"[A] searing, heartfelt novel. This book is rich, enmeshing the personal with the political and historical, told in strange and vertiginous language that seems fitting for a tale of such passion." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review).
"[A] sprawling, wildly ambitious novel... thoughtful and thought-provoking, with a passionate faith in the redemptive powers of art." -- Wendy Smith, The Boston Globe.
"[W]hat the Great Bulgarian Novel could be if it could be rendered in English... Stork Mountain takes wing to the heights." -- Steven G. Kellman, The Dallas Morning News.
"Stork Mountain is a beautiful and haunting novel, one that delves into a painful past and begs the questions: To what extent are we doomed to relive the past and carry it with us? At what point must we relent and set it free?" -- Hilary Rice, Chicago Review of Books.
"It is hard to believe Miroslav Penkov is younger than I am, born in1982, when the experience of reading him is akin to reading the authors of Western classics... [Stork Mountain] is a gorgeous, ambitious,sprawling, multi-dimensional baroque tale of going back to one's ancestral home--in this case a Bulgarian-American man looking for his grandfather, who has gone missing. The political and the mystical, the historical and the spiritual, all intertwine in unexpected ways, as coming-of-age meets love story in this stunning debut." -- Porochista Khakpour, The Barnes and Noble Review.
"An intelligently mapped plot complements the skilful blend of familial relationships with religious commentary, and elements of the hamlets' folklore and rituals lend an added mystery; the story brims but doesn't feel crowded... This is a historically rich study of borders: those imposed by cartography and those that are self-constructed." -- Zoe Apostolides, The Financial Times.
"Stork Mountain is a timely novel when Europe--its entangled past and its uncertain future--occupies the headlines; it is a timeless tale too about the undying and the undead, about dreams not paled by reality, and above all, about a young man's search for an answer by searching for the right question. What a tremendous achievement from one of the best young international writers." -- Yiyun Li, author of Kinder Than Solitude and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.
"A Bulgarian Don Quixote fighting windmills, his Sancho Panza a lost American grandson, and Dulcinea a Turk overfond of smoking dope. Add a smattering of Christian firewalkers, a touch of Muslim clerics, thousands of hysterical storks who deliver more secretsthan babies. What you get is a marvel of a novel. Penkov has written a rollicking, poignant delight." --Rabih Alameddine, National Book Award Finalist and author of An Unnecessary Woman.
"Miroslav Penkov writes with warmth, wit and emotional precision, and Stork Mountain is a gorgeous and big-hearted novel that manages to be both a page-turning adventure story and a nuanced meditation on the meaning of home. This is a fantastic book." --Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans.
"I can't speak to Miroslav Penkov's standing among Bulgarian novelists, but now that I've read Stork Mountain, it is easy to say that Penkov is my favorite novelist publishing in America." -- Kyle Minor, author of Praying Drunk.
"... a love song to his native land." -- Library Journal.
From the Inside Flap
Stork Mountain tells the story of a young Bulgarian immigrant who, in an attempt to escape his mediocre life in America, returns to the country of his birth. Retracing the steps of his estranged grandfather, a man who suddenly and inexplicably cut all contact with the family three years prior, the boy finds himself on the border of Bulgaria and Turkey, a stone's throw away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains. It is a place of pagan mysteries and black storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, possessed by Christian saints, men and women dance barefoot across live coals in search of rebirth. Here in the mountains, the boy reunites with his grandfather. Here in the mountains, he falls in love with an unobtainable Muslim girl. Old ghosts come back to life and forgotten conflicts, in the name of faith and doctrine, blaze anew.
Stork Mountain is an enormously charming, slyly brilliant debut novel from an internationally celebrated writer. It is a novel that will undoubtedly find a home in many readers' hearts.
About the Author
Miroslav Penkov was born in 1982 in Bulgaria. He moved to America in 2001 and received an MFA in creative writing at the University of Arkansas. His stories have won the BBC International Short Story Award 2012 and The Southern Review's Eudora Welty Prize and have appeared in A Public Space, Granta, One Story, The Best American Short Stories 2008, The PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. Published in over a dozen countries, East of the West was a finalist for the 2012 William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the Steven Turner Award for First Fiction by the Texas Institute of Letters. In 2014-15 he was the literature protégé in the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, working with mentor Michael Ondaatje. Penkov teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas, where he is editor-in-chief of the American Literary Review.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Atmospheric
By Lost John
I didn’t look up the Strandja (or Strandzha) part of Bulgaria – it extends into Turkey too – until after I finished reading this book. I wish I had: Wikipedia has a useful map and three pictures that are helpful in setting the scene. To Miroslav Penkov’s credit, though, I found I had already gained a fair idea of the essentials from his book; that the borders with both Turkey and Greece are close by, and that the Black Sea too is likely to be familiar to any native who ever strays even a short distance from their mountain village.
Quite apart from the increasingly cosmopolitan life led by us all these past 25 years (the lapse of time since communism yielded to parliamentary democracy in Bulgaria), even the oldest and most long-established villagers in the Bulgarian Strandja are likely, at some time in their lives, to have seen other parts of their country – for communist governments everywhere were much given to moving people around, or inspiring them to flee.
The basic story-line of Stork Mountain is of the extended visit of a twenty-something Bulgarian-American student to the Strandja mountain village from which his father migrated – precisely because of the communists. The young man’s grandfather is still alive. In his time, grandfather was the village schoolmaster; it was he who built the village school, having taught his first lessons in the open air, in the shade of a cherry tree. He was not a native; together with an Orthodox Christian priest, he had been sent there (and there was an element of flight in this too) by the communists, to counter the Muslim traditions of the mountain people.
If I had to sum up the novel in one word, that word would be ‘atmospheric’. I love the mountains; I’m fascinated by storks; I’m always interested in ‘the way things were’, in any part of the world. The interaction between Christian, Muslim and communist lifestyles is definitely of interest; as are rituals such as whirling barefoot in the raked ashes of a fire, or climbing up to ‘bury’ a skull in a stork’s nest.
The writing is good too, though liable to remind you from time to time that Miroslav Penkov teaches creative writing. Here’s a well-polished paragraph:-
‘For fifteen days and fifteen nights the people of Klisura built, assisted by people from the villages nearby – Bulgarians and Greeks alike. For fifteen days they tasted of this freedom. In vain, Captain Kosta’s rebels looked for help across the hills to the north. In vain, they waited for reinforcement from other Thracian regions. “Let them build,” the captain would say to his men. “More sweat on their brows, less time to think, less time to fear.”’
Here’s a simile that in my opinion doesn’t work:-
‘the broken panes of empty houses knocking like lids of coffins opening and closing shut.’
But it is forgiven as swiftly as this one follows:-
‘Then I climbed out my window, thumped into the cassis bush underneath it like a sack of crab apples, and limped across the yard, down the road, and to our neighbors.’
This is a literary novel, of interest both for its setting and its writing. If those things appeal to you, you are likely to be glad you took it up.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Where three countries meet
By J.K. Currie
The Strandja Mountains which lie on the borderlands of Bulgaria and Turkey are the setting for this remarkable and very enjoyable novel.
An anonymous young American graduate student travels to the obscure village where his Bulgarian grandfather has moved without reference to the rest of the family some years previously. This apparently decent young man quickly finds himself embroiled in mystery and intrigue when he meets among others his Grandpa, the local imam, his rebellious daughter and discovers that in the past, the village was a centre for fire walkers of mixed Bulgarian and Greek origin. Why does the Christian half of the village lie empty while the Muslim is full? What events in the past led to the end of the fire dance and the exodus of the Christians? How was Grandpa involved? Why has he bought up all the derelict houses in the village? Why does the imam want him to sell? Why do the young Muslim girls exhibit a mania for the defunct fire dance?
This is a very clever novel which kept me reading through revelation after shocking revelation. Nothing here is quite what it appears. Expect ulterior motives, secrets, lies, crimes and acts of violence. The reader will learn much of the history of this much abused and exploited region and of differences which are historical, ethnic, religious and above all, familial. There are cunning parallels from Grandpa’s past to the young American’s present. What do we learn from the past? – perhaps, not very much.
Miroslav Penkov is a terrific story teller, above all, and I recommend this novel to anyone who loves to immerse themselves in another world.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A story well composed and told
By Henk-Jan van der Klis
While Mirsloav Penkov got internationally fame with his short-story titles, Stork Mountain is his first novel. The story about a young American student returning to Bulgaria, like a stork flies back to the nest he was born at, is part memoir, part a historical novel about Bulgaria, and a coming of age at the same time. Klisura, a remote village on the border with Turkey has been the scene for Thracians, Greeks, and Turks to conquer the country and impose their culture. Next to that Islam and Christianity also put their mark on the region, the voluntary and compulsive conversions, buildings, ownership of land and education.
The story's pace is alternating throughout the book. From lengthy expositions of the storks' migration paths to short summarized eras, like "And then, devoid of people, the Christian hamlet was transformed into a border zone. Such was the end. (..) The years passed, Grandpa raised my father an honest, smart, hardworking man. My father met my mother, married her, and I was born. Then Communism fell and Father said, We have no future here." The book is full of repetitive small stories and phrases, hooks for the major story line.
Set in the Strandja Mountains where black storks in nest in giant oaks and their lives move with the seasons. Pagan rituals like fire walking, worship of idols and Christian icons are mixed with the rages of the local imam and his daughter. Will the young American be free to fall in love with a Muslim girl? Will his grandfather reveal all answers he's looking for? Although it took me a while to get into the story, it then got my full attention until the very last page. A story well composed and told.
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