Though I doubt that it came as any surprise to the author, it would seem to me that Boris Yashmilye’s failure to secure a deal for the English translation of his most recent novel, Out Damned, is not only symptomatic of the general malaise surrounding the industry, but of a universally ignorant attitude regarding the rights of the writer. Famous for his debut novel, the brash political comedy Flashes at Midnight, Yashmilye has since been the victim of those with unreasonable expectations of his career. Though the quality of Yashmilye’s prose and his engagement with his chosen subject never dropped over the course of his next two novels (The Musala Affair and Nuts Nuts Nuts) his reputation suffered severe blows. After the attractive Communist bashing of Flashes at Midnight, the hope was that Yashmilye would become the prime political satirist of his generation. It wasn’t that he had promised he would; the role was simply thrown upon him, as if he had a duty to fulfil it. And when he decided to shake off this duty, it only seemed natural that he should be punished for it.

    Admittedly, he didn’t make it easy for himself. Though he clearly had nothing left to say beyond that which he had put into Flashes at Midnight, he did put up pretence of political commitment in The Musala Affair; as if drawn into the destiny that had been needlessly laid out before him. The dredges of this approach are still discernible in Nuts Nuts Nuts. Neither book needed to be political, but was yet undermined by Yashmilye’s fear that a complete absence of commitment to Bulgarian governmental issues would work against him. Would not anyone desire to cement the heroic status offered to them on behalf of their early work? They would – but they would be fools to do so. Unless he thought himself capable of replicating or surpassing his first work, Yashmilye would have been best advised to leave that subject well alone; to understand that he had strengths beyond the ability to mock socialism. Unfortunately, it has taken him more than a decade to realise this. On the other hand, unlike many writers, we ought to be glad that he has realised it at all.

    There’s a flipside. Having at last created a novel that doesn’t even pretend to be political – and that is all the better for it – Yashmilye has faced an uphill struggle in selling it. Now that he has relinquished his position as political spokesperson for a generation, the publishers clearly don’t see any currency in his output. Nevermind the fact that he has just written his best novel. The problem is that Out Damned is not considered to be a typical ‘Yashmilye’ product, with the result that, though the author’s name still carries enough weight to have guaranteed publication in his native Bulgaria, the book has yet to attract any foreign publishers. To put this into perspective; Flashes at Midnight  is currently available in twenty-four different languages, The Musala Affair in twelve and Nuts Nuts Nuts in eight (with a Mongolian version on its way). This would suggest that Out Damned represents a serious dip in Yashmilye’s career. I would like to argue not only that it doesn’t, but that it is much more consistent with his previous work than most critics would have us think.

    I am not about to argue that Out Damned is politically engaged. That would be a lie. As novels go, this one is about as inward looking as you can get. It does not deal with events that affect people on a national level - not even in a metaphorical way. Instead, its primary subject is the human body. Or should I say, its primary subject is the human face. Or even, the author’s face. This is what we might call a ‘narrow subject’. But it is far from a new subject. For all its political content, Flashes at Midnight reveals a similar preoccupation with bodily corporeality. As Georgy Riecke has pointed out, Yashmilye takes more than basic interest in the business of streaking, uncovering and minutely defining ‘parts of the body you were never sure existed’ with a ‘painter’s interest for the colours of human flesh’ that has reminded some of Caravaggio. Though less obvious, there are a few passages in Nuts Nuts Nuts which have the same effect, principally in the latter half, when the narrator suffers from monetary obsessions with the lustre of his lover’s earlobe. At the end of one such diversion, he writes: ‘I longed to take a trip along the landscape of her ear. We could have a picnic in the cochlea, perhaps, or share a cigarette in the saccule’. The fantasy does not extend beyond this cursory point, but clearly lays the foundation for Out Damned, which consists entirely of journeying through the landscape of the human face. However, where the fancies of Nuts Nuts Nuts are provoked by purely romantic motives, Out Damned springs from the equally fertile, but less obviously sugared ground of self-centred teenage angst.

    The landscape of Out Damned is the face of the author at the age of sixteen. As such, it is a face blighted by acne. And Yashmilye makes no attempt whatsoever to downplay the extent of his own teenage torments. Though recast as hills or mountains in a land inhabited by very small people, these spots are not only great in number, but great in size and shape. In short, they are super-spots. Puss-heavy, reddened, black-headed and inspiringly foul in every way imaginable, they remain the surprising heroes of this unique novel. By eschewing obvious attempts at romanticising the unsightly, Yashmilye brings an unexpected poetry to the previously ugly.

    According to one report, the novel is in fact derived from so-called ‘spot diaries’ that the author wrote as teenager. These took the form of the usual diary, except that where most diarists concentrate on where they have been and what they have done during the day, Yashmilye was rather more interested in the behaviour of the skin on his face, noting with frightening detail all the new arrivals – and the rapidly changing state of old friends. We don’t know whether he mapped them; but the series of maps that are included within the novel suggest that he might have done. Though these maps try not to spare any details, they are nonetheless reminiscent of so many maps; a timely reminder of the way in which the scarred landscape of one’s face resembles the scarred landscape of the earth; with spots filling in for hills, the partially bearded chin for the ‘poor wood’ of the opening pages, and the ‘uncomfortably misshapen’ nose the terrain for the challenging ascent that takes up most of the novel’s second half. The eyes, meanwhile, are cast as lakes: dangerously alluring traps that the travellers must avoid at all costs, whilst the nostrils are 'the twin caves of Gogancho, wherein lie the mighty beasts of Snotterdam'.

    This is the stage. The sixteen year old face, in all its hormonally challenged glory. And yet, unlike so many artists, Yashmilye is not out for laughs. He is not reliving his early adolescence, as many do, in the hope of extracting comedy from the fumbling, awkward, pathetic and frequently miserable errors of that age. Nor does he ever strike me as being over-earnest; begging for the reader to pour out buckets of sympathy for the sake of a dodgy skin condition. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t feel for his face, but that there is more to this novel than this. If anything, the relationship between the author and his teenage face is ambiguous – as it should be. He isn’t remonstrating with it; he isn’t laughing at it; he isn’t trying to horrify us with it. He is simply describing it, bit by bit, in the hope of coming to some sort of understanding; maybe in order to come to terms with the pain that it caused at the time; or maybe because, quite simply, he sees potential in it as the setting for a story. Though, as I have said, he doesn’t openly romanticise it, the ultimate effect is one of recreation; of cleansing the dirty not through destroying it, but by describing it – and learning to live with it.

    And this is exactly what the characters of Out Damned are forced to do. With the author’s face as the backdrop, their mission is to make it from one public house (‘The Adam’s Apple’) to another (‘The Crown’) by travelling across the terrain of the face, taking the route laid out by their leader, the intrepid Maximillian. This route is not exactly straight, but certainly scenic, leading them through several mounds of chin and cheek-bound acne, up the left side of the nose and across the spot-strewn forehead. It’s a long trip for these surprisingly small people; but it isn’t always a tough one. After all, they are not as well trained as we are when it comes to interpreting ugliness. Some of them even go so far as to find the views over ‘red hills capped with what seemed to be yellow snow’ to be ‘rather pleasant, in their way’. And it is increasingly hard for the reader not to agree with them. Without ever trying our patience with the hyperbolic language of the cheap travel brochure, Yashmilye never fails to glean a certain beauty from the scene. Indeed, the only element of the landscape about which he seems to be truly disparaging is the wood through which they pass at the start, representing a rather pathetic attempt by his teenage self at growing a beard. This attitude, I feel, may be the result of the author recognising a conscious attempt to court style. It would explain why he is much kinder when it comes to dealing with the poor state of his skin which, for all the myths and legends, could hardly be said to be an equally fair result of specific decisions taken.

I say ‘much kinder’. In fact, there are moments when he almost seems to revel in the spots. One of them is welcomed by the travellers as some kind of miracle; its gradual appearance (or eruption from the skin/ground) being compared to that of blossom in spring. When it is seen to disappear, or dwindle after some days, it is seen as an example of ‘fleeting beauty’. This alone is worth the price of the book! Baring in mind the fact that Yashmilye is not angling for laughs, the manner in which he manages to convince his readers that acne might well be construed as an example of beauty’s fleeting nature is nothing short of genius. But it is as uncomfortable as it is inspiring. The blossom comparison is at least a metaphorical one; whereas hints as to the resemblance between a festering boil and the rather more admired nipple are less easy to accept. Not that this isn’t a viable point. It is. And a brave one at that. That doesn’t mean that it won’t remain, for most people, more than a little hard to stomach.

    The focus of this review has been, as yet, one sided. I have spoken mostly of the backdrop and said little of the actual characters. Out Damned is about a journey; but this is not to say that the people taking this journey are not interesting in themselves. To say that they were hastily devised constructs designed to fit into a more carefully managed habitat would not be true. Maximillian is a fascinating figure, quite apart from the surroundings in which he finds himself. Were he not so appealing, the novel would fall apart. Despite this, its greatness still lies elsewhere: in an area where Yashmilye has proved himself a master, not just this once, but over the course of his career. I talk not of political fiction; but its near opposite: fiction centred on the self, on the physical reality of the human body – this case in which we travel, this living coffin, this damaged vessel, this assemblage of spotty skin and crumbling bones, of wrinkles and warts, boils and blemishes. This body with which we are stuck, whether we like it or not. The wonders of modern surgery may have given us the ability to cover up the scars, but the only way to make them hurt less, Yashmilye might well argue, is to come to terms with them. On these grounds his repetition of Lady Macbeth’s famous ‘out damned spot’ (Yashmilye is said to have toyed with ‘Pepperoni’ as an alternative title) is less a frustrated exhortation than a measured command born out of the realisation that writing is a more than capable form of exorcism.

   Having said that, the results of an exorcism are not usually as readable as this. This is why I must continue to rail against those ignorant idiots who refuse to grant it the opportunity to be read by those who do not speak Bulgarian. What possible reasons can you give for denying the International community the chance to read this novel? If there was an kilogram of justice in this world, Out Damned would be available in every language there is. It seems to me a elephant-sized irony that Flashes at Midnight, praised for its depiction of Eastern European politics, should be more widely read than a book whose major theme - the human body - is absolutely universal. How many readers have not experienced waking up to the sight of a spot on their chin or cheek? Very few, I would say. As for the others, Out Damned represents the perfect tonic: cheaper than gallons of face cream, it promises not to transform the landscape of your face, but to lead you through it instead, and to see it anew, in all its fleeting beauty.

    It is in the knowledge that the editor of this literary journal, Georgy Riecke, is a great fan of Yashmilye's work, that I take this oppurtunity to ask everyone here today to join me in my fight to have his novel more widely published. If we can rustle up enough interest via this website, there can be no more excuses. Publishers will have to take notice. And if all we can do is secure an English translation, this will have been a valuable start. No more shall we cry in the wilderness, our voices as frail as the reeds by the river; but strung together, like rope, we shall conquer the beast that is the modern publishing industry.

    As a sign of my seriousness, I have even gone to the extent of translating a few lines myself. My Bulgarian is not great - and it has taken me several months to complete this single paragraph - but if this short passage is able to excite the interest of enough readers, who knows what the next step will be? It is with these lines that I leave you now. If you wish to read on, you are invited to make your voice heard - in this way only will the great and glorious Out Damned be made available to readers of a non-Bulgarian nature.

    The travellers came through the forest safely. Perhaps this was because it wasn’t a very dense forest. In fact it was a pathetic excuse for a forest. The trees were too widely spaced, nor were they particularly tall. Maybe it was more of a wood, a poor wood, or a copse. All of which begs the question, irrelevant as it is: when does a wood become a forest? Is it like graduating from a BA to an MA? Or an MA to a Phd?

    Far be it from me to boast of my manliness. In which case let us say that it was a measly orchard through which these intrepid travellers passed. A paltry assemblage of foliage, which thickened from nothingness into something barely more than that: a meagre thingness posing as a concrete substance. ..