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3.86 AVERAGE
3.86 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
‘It is an act of rebellion to remain present, to go against society’s desire for you to numb yourself, to look away,’ wrote musician Florence Welch in an essay for Vogue, ‘but we must not look away.’ Nataliya Deleva asks us to be present and bear the burdens of countless people around the world facing waking nightmares every day in her novel Four Minutes, a book short of page length but endless on heart and courage. Beautifully translated by Izidora Angel, this is a powerful work of sheer poetic beauty with prose that will tear you into pieces only to turn around and remake you stronger and wiser than before (luckily for English readers, another of Deleva’s novels, Arrival, will be published in 2022). The catch about having a job where I can read at work is that I often find myself wrestling with complex and difficult emotions while in a public-facing desk hoping nobody interrupts me until I reach a chapter break. This book was one that I wanted to shut the rest of the world out while I read. It frayed my nerves, tears welled up in my eyes, I felt the weight of the world and the pain of all the children in the orphanage in the novel. But, through it all, I felt the beautiful determination of the narrator to keep on going and to find ways to mend not only her hurts but hopefully assuage those of others. She reminds us that, at the end of the day, being cared about and caring for another is the spark in the darkness lighting the way to carry on under horrific burdens.
‘What did life in the Home teach me? The only thing that mattered. Survival.’
The bulk of Four Minutes is told in vignettes that swirl through the life of the narrator, from her times ‘buried alive in the hell of my misery’ in an orphanage called the Home to her life after as a play therapist in a similar orphanage hoping to ease the pains of children like herself. Interspersed through the primary narrative are nine character investigations of others, mostly also living in post-communist Bulgaria. These chapters are brief, intended presumably to be read in four minutes based on a theory by psychologist Arthur Aron that ‘looking into a stranger’s eyes for four minutes is the most powerful way to bring people closer.’ Deleva invites the reader to learn about Amnesty International Poland’s own experiment in 2016 during a refugee crisis to show, as Amnesty Director Draginja Nadażdin says ‘borders exist between countries, not people.’ The novel, in effect, becomes it’s own brilliant variation on the experiment, making the reader participants as we stare into these lives fraught with heartache and hardship and —we discover —can only walk away feeling deeply for them in our hearts.
‘In healing someone else’s wounds I was somehow healing my own.’
Despite the heavy blanket of sadness and suffering that weighs on every page of this book, ultimately the one word I’d choose to define Four Mintues is ‘empathy’. It flows forth from the narrator and takes a grip on our own hearts. Her own story is quite tragic, abandoned at birth by a mother she would never know and can only guess at the reasons for her own orphanhood. Abandonment, she fears, is her defining feature:
The vignettes describing life in the Home are intense, from children beating another to death for taking a lick of food not belonging to him or the narrator soiling herself every night to stave off the endless cycle of rapes after lights out, all ignored by the staff. Life after the Home is not easy either, living under food shortages and being a lesbian in a society not ready to accept her. Acceptance and easing suffering becomes an important aspect of her, and she and her lover avoid gay clubs ‘because we felt they were exclusionary. They labeled our love as somehow different and forbidden..that same-sex couples were abnormal and needed their own clubs.’
After a difficult childhood, she turns her life to caring for other children who have also been abandoned. As a child she watched the mothers come to the Home and ‘wondered if the mom’s came here to save one of us or to find salvation for themselves,’ and still as an adult working with children still wonder’s the same, but about herself observing ‘I wasn’t sure who really was helping whom patch up her childhood.’ What is most moving is the way she has looked darkness direct in the face and has decided to use her time to protect and heal others from it, particularly children in orphanages as she herself is denied the right to adopt due to being a lesbian and unmarried.
In many of these 4-minute segments, we find the narrator wanting to help, or to hear their stories. With no childhood memories of family of her own, she has become a collector of memories from others. The book feels, in effect, like a scrapbook where she has taped all she finds from her life. The good and the bad. The things we must not look away from to remind us to always help and give empathy, even if you can’t change anything. Because there are some who prefer the numbness that Florence Welch warned against. Around me now, like a scene set in a coffee shop in this book, I hear parents argue that schools shouldn’t teach the uncomfortable parts of history or talk about the tragedies happening around us all. But, the book argues, looking away doesn’t help anyone and only allows harm to continue. ‘I think of the persecuted, the violated, the exiled, the orphaned,’ she writes, ‘the hundreds of thousands of children who aren’t in history class.’ This book is for those children, and we should all be standing up for those children.
This is a novel that will sit heavily in my soul like stones at the bottom of a pond and I am better for it. I think we all could be and I highly encourage reading this book. To extra entice you, this is pubished by Open Letter Books who are doing realy great things and committed to translation (and always puts the translators name on the title for those of you following [a:Jennifer Croft|915622|Jennifer Croft|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] writing great articles fighting for the respect of translators). The prose in this book harmonizes with your heart and is lovingly translated, and luckily for English readers Deleva has another book, Arrival, coming in 2022. Sad but necessary, short but powerful, Four Minutes is a perfectly intertwined gem of humanity. This is a book that reminds me why I enjoy reading.
5/5
‘Which is more impossible to live with: to be abandoned or to abandon and live with the guilt of it your entire life?’
‘What did life in the Home teach me? The only thing that mattered. Survival.’
The bulk of Four Minutes is told in vignettes that swirl through the life of the narrator, from her times ‘buried alive in the hell of my misery’ in an orphanage called the Home to her life after as a play therapist in a similar orphanage hoping to ease the pains of children like herself. Interspersed through the primary narrative are nine character investigations of others, mostly also living in post-communist Bulgaria. These chapters are brief, intended presumably to be read in four minutes based on a theory by psychologist Arthur Aron that ‘looking into a stranger’s eyes for four minutes is the most powerful way to bring people closer.’ Deleva invites the reader to learn about Amnesty International Poland’s own experiment in 2016 during a refugee crisis to show, as Amnesty Director Draginja Nadażdin says ‘borders exist between countries, not people.’ The novel, in effect, becomes it’s own brilliant variation on the experiment, making the reader participants as we stare into these lives fraught with heartache and hardship and —we discover —can only walk away feeling deeply for them in our hearts.
‘In healing someone else’s wounds I was somehow healing my own.’
Despite the heavy blanket of sadness and suffering that weighs on every page of this book, ultimately the one word I’d choose to define Four Mintues is ‘empathy’. It flows forth from the narrator and takes a grip on our own hearts. Her own story is quite tragic, abandoned at birth by a mother she would never know and can only guess at the reasons for her own orphanhood. Abandonment, she fears, is her defining feature:
’Then she had left. Left me alone inside an incubator, where I took my first breaths, cutting the sterile hospital quiet with my immature lungs and painfully inhaling the abandonment that would come to define me.’
The vignettes describing life in the Home are intense, from children beating another to death for taking a lick of food not belonging to him or the narrator soiling herself every night to stave off the endless cycle of rapes after lights out, all ignored by the staff. Life after the Home is not easy either, living under food shortages and being a lesbian in a society not ready to accept her. Acceptance and easing suffering becomes an important aspect of her, and she and her lover avoid gay clubs ‘because we felt they were exclusionary. They labeled our love as somehow different and forbidden..that same-sex couples were abnormal and needed their own clubs.’
After a difficult childhood, she turns her life to caring for other children who have also been abandoned. As a child she watched the mothers come to the Home and ‘wondered if the mom’s came here to save one of us or to find salvation for themselves,’ and still as an adult working with children still wonder’s the same, but about herself observing ‘I wasn’t sure who really was helping whom patch up her childhood.’ What is most moving is the way she has looked darkness direct in the face and has decided to use her time to protect and heal others from it, particularly children in orphanages as she herself is denied the right to adopt due to being a lesbian and unmarried.
‘I plant dreams into their little minds, give them wings to fly over the horrors of their daily lives, so they can believe there’s something better out there on the other side of it all. A life that’s possible if they only have the strength to believe it. Believe in themselves, believe in the people around them, believe there is some sort of happy ending.’
In many of these 4-minute segments, we find the narrator wanting to help, or to hear their stories. With no childhood memories of family of her own, she has become a collector of memories from others. The book feels, in effect, like a scrapbook where she has taped all she finds from her life. The good and the bad. The things we must not look away from to remind us to always help and give empathy, even if you can’t change anything. Because there are some who prefer the numbness that Florence Welch warned against. Around me now, like a scene set in a coffee shop in this book, I hear parents argue that schools shouldn’t teach the uncomfortable parts of history or talk about the tragedies happening around us all. But, the book argues, looking away doesn’t help anyone and only allows harm to continue. ‘I think of the persecuted, the violated, the exiled, the orphaned,’ she writes, ‘the hundreds of thousands of children who aren’t in history class.’ This book is for those children, and we should all be standing up for those children.
This is a novel that will sit heavily in my soul like stones at the bottom of a pond and I am better for it. I think we all could be and I highly encourage reading this book. To extra entice you, this is pubished by Open Letter Books who are doing realy great things and committed to translation (and always puts the translators name on the title for those of you following [a:Jennifer Croft|915622|Jennifer Croft|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] writing great articles fighting for the respect of translators). The prose in this book harmonizes with your heart and is lovingly translated, and luckily for English readers Deleva has another book, Arrival, coming in 2022. Sad but necessary, short but powerful, Four Minutes is a perfectly intertwined gem of humanity. This is a book that reminds me why I enjoy reading.
5/5
‘Which is more impossible to live with: to be abandoned or to abandon and live with the guilt of it your entire life?’
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
This book was very good and very sad. There wasn’t many good things happening in the book just a lot of empathizing with the other characters. I didn’t really understand the ending but I can theorize.
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
reflective
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Child death, Homophobia, Rape, Grief, Lesbophobia, Abandonment
Minor: Animal cruelty, Animal death, War
sad
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Animal death, Bullying, Child abuse, Death, Incest, Physical abuse, Rape, Sexism, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Violence, Grief, Death of parent, Murder, Abandonment