![]() ![]() ![]() I was ecstatic, lexicon drunk.”įor Penkov’s readers, the result is a thoroughly convincing American idiom that carries the history of the Balkans on its back. What were they making out?” So the narrator plunges into his second immersion course, soaking in the vernacular until “the words rose liberated. Why was my roommate so excited to see two girls … making out. A character named Sinko tells us that as a boy in Bulgaria, while his “peers were busy drinking, smoking, having sex, playing dice, lying to their parents … or making bombs for soccer games, I studied English.” Accepted (like Penkov) to college in Arkansas, Sinko soon learns that lurking behind his second language is a third, the one that says, “it was fixin’ to rain” and “a bummer” and “yonder.” He continues: “I was exposed to words I didn’t know. And this mastery was hard-won, if we can judge from the narrator’s experience in “Buying Lenin,” one of the droll, sad tales in East of the West, the first collection of Penkov’s fiction. ![]() ![]() His splendid prose can be fleet, leisurely, colloquial, or formal. THE BULGARIAN AUTHOR Miroslav Penkov, who writes in English, is more at home in his adopted language than his discontented characters are in their own skins. ![]()
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