As for Highlander
In this novel Rositsa Tasheva remains loyal to her attachment to the subtle smile, to the irony and when necessary – the open sarcasm. The main character of this novel is a charming loser who has strange conceptions about life and living. He always has various plans but never accomplishes them. Everybody calls him Highlander. Highlander is the nickname of a painter who stopped painting 20 years ago. Apart from not painting, he manages to carry out several other things in his life: he gets married, he seeks a suitable job, he dreams of words, he haunts his favourite pubs and tries to sell a painting. Otherwise he needs nothing, but money and love.
Benny, the journalist, who is also a linguist and Bulgarophobe, Sonya, the pharmacologist, who also paints on silken scarves, Stephen the Social and his prehistoric car, Dr. Pesheva and her stingy husband all march along with the Highlander through the book’s pages. There is also an academic, a professor, a flying cat, a sailing dog, a teenage girl and a student as well as prime-ministers, members of parliament, politicians, cops and all kinds of fauna to complete the picture of present-day Bulgaria. This mixture is described with the inherent for the author elegant sense of humour, well known by the reading public from her first two books and highly appreciated by all, whom cherish a hearty laugh.
Rositsa Tasheva
The Bulgarian writer Rositsa Tasheva has three books to her credit and they have already established her as one of the most talented humorists in the country. She was born in Sofia, where she graduated from an English Language High School and then – from the French Philology Department at Sofia University. She has been on the staff of the “Sofia Press” Agency, the French Embassy in Sofia and the Bulgarian Embassy in Paris. Presently she is working as an editor at the Colibri publishing house.
After her experience in Paris she wrote the book “Of Diplomats and Men” (1998) in which the life of Bulgarian diplomats during the first years of democracy is described with a subtle sense of humour. Actually diplomats from many countries have recognized their mirror-images in it. Her next book – “Domestic Apocalypse” (2000) – is a story about the everyday life of a typical and also untypical, but definitely weird family. The book enjoyed enormous success and raised many sincere laughs from readers who have shared the same silly scenes and situations of domestic apocalypse. The novel “As for the Highlander” (2010) describes with a smile and sympathy one year in the life of a painter suffering from a lifelong crisis – looser with a heart of gold and a knack for easy living.
Rositsa Tasheva is one of the best Bulgarian translators from the French. More than 50 books of Balzac, Maupassant, Flaubert, Céline, Albert Cohen, San Antonio, Jean Jeunet, Kundera, Cioran and many others have appeared under her translating pen. She has been given The Prize of the Union of Translators in Bulgaria three times – in 1985, 1996 and 2006.
