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Border
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₹5/month for first 3 months
Border
Buy Now for ₹667.71
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Narrated by:
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Corrie James
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Written by:
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Kapka Kassabova
Winner of the 2017 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year
Winner of the 2017 Saltire Society Non-Fiction Book of the Year
Short-listed for the 2017 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
Short-listed for the 2017 Gordon Burn Prize
When Kapka Kassabova was a child, the border zone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece was rumoured to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, so it swarmed with soldiers, spies and fugitives. On holidays close to the border on the Black Sea coast, she remembers playing on the beach, only miles from where an electrified fence bristled, its barbs pointing inwards toward the enemy: the holiday makers, the potential escapees.
Today, this densely forested landscape is no longer heavily militarised, but it is scarred by its past. In Border, Kapka Kassabova sets out on a journey to meet the people of this triple border - Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks and the latest wave of refugees fleeing conflict further afield. She discovers a region that has been shaped by the successive forces of history: by its own past migration crises, by communism, by two world wars, by the Ottoman Empire and - older still - by the ancient legacy of myths and legends.
As Kapka Kassabova explores this enigmatic region in the company of border guards and treasure hunters, entrepreneurs and botanists, psychic healers and ritual fire-walkers, refugees and smugglers, she traces the physical and psychological borders that crisscross its villages and mountains and goes in search of the stories that will unlock its secrets.
Border is a sharply observed portrait of a little-known corner of Europe and a fascinating meditation on the borderlines that exist between countries, between cultures, between people and within each of us.
Cover design and illustration by Kimberly Glyder.
©2018 Kapka Kassabova (P)2018 Audible, LtdThe book also lands at a convenient moment. Contemporary publishing has settled into a monoculture where every shelf holds the same thriller, the same tour of someone's feelings, and the same book about reading minds by authors who can't read the room. Border reminds you what a book was supposed to do all along: let you sit in your own country and learn about lands that are half mythical and in some cases impossible to visit, until you understand them anyway. Travel without the airline losing your luggage.
Then there is the politics, or rather the absence of it. Kassabova looks at the people on this frontier without first sorting them into political, religious, or ethnic bins, which in this genre is practically a hostile act. What she writes about instead is human psyche and human pain, so beautifully and so mystically that the sorrow starts to feel like a feature. You will finish a chapter bereaved and immediately reach for the next one. I have not found a better way to be sad on purpose.
My one grievance is that the book quietly handed me a second job. Every few pages I was on my phone, opening maps and hunting for photos of the places she described, a lot of unpaid labor. A few maps and pictures would have spared me. Then I realized what had happened: she made me so desperate to see these places that I went searching, which is the strongest endorsement I can offer. The frustration was the proof. I withdraw the complaint and file it under evidence.
A review can't hold everything in these pages, and Kassabova can't be summarized, so do what I did and read it yourself.
Rating: five out of five, stamped, approved, and waved through with no visa required.
Stamped, approved, and waved through with no visa required
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