
Farid Ghadami on Danube’s riverbank(photo: Podul Prieteniei)

This Iranian novel is inspired by Farid Ghadami’s experience in Bulgaria in the summer of 2019 (photo: Farid Ghadami)
The city of Rousse through the eyes of the Iranian writer Farid Ghadami
A chapter of Farid Ghadami’s novel called “The Commune of the Dead or An Elegy to Sofia’s Bloody Shirt” which is based on his experiences in Bulgaria, mingled with other stories about Mayakovski, Vaptsarov, Nenko Balkanski, Stalin, James Joyce and a Bulgarian girl named Sofia in the 11th century who joins Assassins (Hashashin) in Iran. This novel will be published in Iran in May 2020, in Persian.
It is on the morning of the13th of August that Yana, with her son, comes to pick me up for Russe: a five-hour drive through the lush mountains of the Balkans. At the invitation of the International Elias Canetti Association, I will give a speech in Russe on the anniversary of Canetti’s death, and luckily for me, Yana and her son want to go to a Metallica concert in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, which is an hour and a half away from Russe, and they are going to drop me off in Russe first and cross the Bridge of Friendship between the two countries and go to Bucharest.
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