There is a Bulgarian saying about a certain Chukchi (there are many Bulgarian sayings about this nameless inhabitant of Chukotka): “Chukchi,” the Chukchi says of himself, “is not a reader. Chukchi is a writer.” This was me as a kid. I wrote without reading. The first book that turned my head was “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” I was 10. My goodness, that moor! And that Holmes! This book lasted me for years. I wrote my own detective stories. Those led me to Poe and he led me to Stephen King and King was a tremendous influence in my teenage years, not just with the boldness of his plots, but also with his personal example — that of a prolific writer so fully dedicated to his craft.
When I arrived in the U.S. (I was 18) I could not comprehend why people drank Dr. Pepper. I thought the stuff was horrible. But out of stubbornness I drank it for a month and now I can't get enough. When I first read Chekhov's “The Lady with the Little Dog,” I didn't really like it. But I knew there was something there, something I could feel, but not articulate. So I read more of him, then Tolstoy, then Dostoyevsky, and acquired a taste. The way Tolstoy can surrender himself to his characters, the honesty with which he writes about them; Dostoyevsky's passion, his humor (his drunks say hilarious things), his love for his protagonists — those wow me, always.
Hemingway was a massive influence, but as the Chukchi saying goes, Hemingway has ruined more writers than whiskey. Marquez and Borges and then Umberto Eco opened new horizons for me.
Once a Romanian reviewer compared my writing to Nikos Kazantzakis and I wanted to weep, because, still at the moment, Kazantzakis is the writer closest to my heart. I have no hopes of a career in writing. Instead, I have hopes of writing the novels I would like to write, but I'm filled with fear — of failure, of mediocrity, of death. And so sometimes I look at Stephen King and this look is, sometimes, liberating. Or other times I look at Kazantzakis and I am filled with both elation and great sadness. In the twilight of his days, he wanted to stand at a street corner and ask each passer-by for half an hour of their life so, with their time, he could write a few more of his own books.
I love William Trevor. Is a “why” necessary? One simply ought to read his stories. I love Umberto Eco, whose genius is not necessarily in his great knowledge, but in his ability, surely through sorcery, to make his reader part of the quest, to make the reader feel just as smart and only later, when the book is done, realize the grave truth.
I love “The Sopranos,” “Deadwood,” “The Wire,” in this order. I love Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, Dave Chappelle. But above all I love many Bulgarian movies.
Miroslav Penkov's debut short-story collection, “East of the West” (FSG), is in bookstores now.
Stephen King's influence on Miroslav Penkov
