Kapka kassabova biography of donald
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Northwords Now
by Nick Major
To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace is published by Granta Books, £14.99, and was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week in February this year.
“Nan Shepherd has a lovely line in The Living Mountain: ‘Place and mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it.’ I guess – ultimately - that is what drives me too, this fascination with how place and human beings interpenetrate each other.” Kapka Kassabova is sitting cross-legged on the floor of her study talking not - as you might think - about The Cairngorms, but about Europe’s two oldest lakes. Lakes Ohrid and Prespa are “embedded diamond-like in the mountain folds of western Macedonia and eastern Albania,” and seen from above, “the pair look like eyes in an ancient face.” The description is an apt one. There is no scientific consensus on their precise age, but they could be three million years old.
Ohrid and Prespa’s natural and human ecology are the subject of Kassabova’s new travel book, To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace. Lake Ohrid has been a presence in Kassabova’s life since childhood. As she writes in her spa
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Memoir Gets its Own Back: Kapka Kassabova on how an Idea Morphed into a Published Book
‘If you want to work on your art, work on your life.’ – Chekhov
Ten years ago, I was a single East European émigré living in Auckland and caught between Old and New Worlds, two passports, the end of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of the 21st century.
How timely, then, that one night I should walk into a bar and see a couple on the dance floor, moving to what sounded like the soundtrack to my life. Their chests were glued together, their hips rigid, and their faces lost in some fantasy of a better world. They were, of course, doing the tango. And that fantasy soon became mine. The soundtrack to my life turned out to be Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Oblivion’, tango’s most existential tune and a must for all melancholics.
I say ‘timely’ for two reasons. One, because you can already tell from the above sketch that the young émigré took herself very seriously in her culturally dispossessed predicament. And what dance is better suited to the culturally dispossessed than the tango? I could have taken ceroc, salsa, or any other happy dance where I could have drank mojitos, shaken my hips, and grinned with all my teeth at the uncomplicated blokes partnering me in our three basic steps. Cha-cha-c
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