Anima

June 24, 2024
Poet Kassabova (Elixir) concludes her Balkan quartet with this vivid account of the months she spent with the Karakachan people near Bulgaria’s Pirin Mountains. Describing her subjects’ day-to-day lives, Kassabova recounts accompanying shepherds as they struggled to milk uncooperative goats and to corral sheep flocks as they traveled to grazing grounds. “Everything felt difficult,” she writes, recalling how incessant barking from dogs tasked with protecting livestock often made sleep impossible and how arduous it was to prepare food in huts that sometimes lacked electricity or plumbing. Though Karakachans were forced to give up their nomadic way of life amid increased policing of national borders during the Cold War, Kassabova suggests that their close relationship with the land can still be seen in such customs as burying dead shepherds under rocks that eventually “mossed and blended with the landscape.” Noting existential threats to the Karakachans’ way of life, she explains how their indigenous semidomesticated sheep have a hard time competing in commercial markets with breeds genetically engineered to produce more milk. Kassabova’s lyrical sensibility will transport readers, as when she remarks on the various forests she passed through: “Pine is rational and streamlined in its Gothic architecture,” while “oak is musical, the leaves trill and light passes through it like waves.” This pensive travelogue captures the rigors and attractions of a vanishing way of life. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.

Starred review from June 15, 2024
A fascinating account of pastoralism in the Balkans. In her fourth book set in a region unknown to many readers, Kassabova examines the threats facing one of the few remaining nomadic peoples in modernity: the Karakachans, "Greek speakers of mysterious origin" whose homeland is "impossible to know." Moving their animals in search of fresh pasture, they have spent centuries breeding ancient races of sheep and dogs. Today, amid the tumult of climate change and political conflicts, their way of life is threatened. "Thirty years ago," writes the author, "it had been the Karakachan dog and sheep on the brink of extinction. Now it was the shepherd." In the modern world, their nomadic lifestyles are very difficult to maintain. Shepherds are completely isolated, living alone in unheated shacks and sleeping with the sheep in mountain storms ("You stand in the rain, plastic sheet draped over you like a hut and you wait"). As industrialization and bureaucracy have increased, the production of artisan goods is also under threat. With the same elegantly spare prose that characterized her previous books, Kassabova brings readers to a place where everything "was attached to rock, hewn from rock, reclaimed from rock or possessed the qualities of rock." The stoic people she profiles seem like they might be hewn from rock, as well. Then there's the ancient Karakachan dogs: "Their eyes were human. They walked with the loose gait of wolves and the puppies were like bear cubs, with expressions so knowing they stopped you in your tracks and made you stare as if into the eyes of an old friend. They were aloof and conscious of it." At its heart, this is an emotional story about the bonds between humans, animals, and the land. A lush ode to "one of the oldest nomadic peoples to have entered modernity with their animals."

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