The past is a place you can never really escape from. Denchev carefully dissects the problematic aspects of a whole generation’s mindset.
– Antonia Apostolova, Literary Conversations
NOVEL, 300 pages, 2019
THE SMALL GOD OF EARTHQUAKES
The Small God of Earthquakes is a novel about а personal apocalypse where the past is the epicenter of unspeakable anhedonia. The book begins, like many others, with a separation – a woman leaves her husband for no particular reason. She does it in the old-fashioned way, with a note written in a rush. Her husband doesn’t seem to be surprised, even at first heaving a sigh of relief, that nothing bad happened to her. Thus, we enter the world of an unrealized philosopher who owns a flower shop. In an attempt to unravel the mystery of his wife’s disappearance, he undertakes a traumatic journey into the past – in his wardrobe, among the ruins of his father’s house, on the streets of Sofia, on the banks of the Danube, in the middle of a bazaar in Skopje.
Is this intense search able to provide relief for his sense of life composed of fear and scarcity? Is it possible for a personal God to stabilize the landslide of life so as to slow the advance of the madness that turns men into machines?