Колко какофония може да си позволи романът на прехода? Повествователният модел в романа на Уве Телкамп „Кула“ и българските романи на прехода („Разруха“ на Владимир Зарев и „Чекмо“ на Момчил Николов)
How Much Cacophony Can the Transition Novel Accommodate? The Narrative Model of Uwe Tellkamp’s Novel 'The tower' and Bulgarian Novels of the Transition (Vladimir Zarev’s 'Decay' and Momchil Nikolov’s 'Chekmo')

Author(s): Boris Minkov
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Studies of Literature, Comparative Study of Literature, Bulgarian Literature, German Literature
Published by: Софийски университет »Св. Климент Охридски«
Keywords: determinism; stream of consciousness; picaresque novel; contingent worlds; dissolution of values
Summary/Abstract: The article compares and contrasts Uwe Telkam’s novel The Tower (2008) and the attitudes inherent in Bulgarian novels dedicated to the Transition. Vladimir Zarev‘s Razruha [Decay] and Momchil Nikolov’s Chekmo are chosen as the focus because of their distinctive symptomatics. The Tower gathers in its kaleidoscopic perspective the points of view of three characters. With great plasticity and subtlety, the narrative shifts from the auctorial (authorial) narrative of a thirdperson omniscient and omnipresent narrator to different personal perspectives, but repeatedly keeps returning to the former mode. Between the meticulous construction of the enclosed world of a 1980s Dresden neighborhood (with detailed representations of everyday life, material culture, and specific manifestations of local, class-based and professionally differentiated folklore), and the intense, seemingly surreal visions, there are characteristic discontinuities but also possible interconnections. The Tower thus combines the modes of a typical nineteenth-century novel with the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique. Bulgarian literary practice typically leaves little room for any deviations from the suggestion of strict order as both a social and a narrative model. As regards the Transition, in particular, Bulgarian writers quite openly endorse assessments that are devoid of ambiguities, heteroglossia and multiple interpretations. In the present article, this is traced in Razruha, where the narrative is traditional and almost trivial, and in the novel Chekmo, which follows a picaresque model.

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