Published in Bulgarian in 2006, Vladislav Todorov‘s debut novel Zift has been recently translated into English by Joseph Benatov (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2010). The very title of Todorov‘s novel, Zift: Socialist Noir, announces the text‘s generic ambiguity. Most notably, the novel interweaves the key tropes of Soviet socialist realism and American hard-boiled detective fiction to produce a richly inter-textual portrayal of a nightmarish – yet comical – Bulgarian communist society in late 1963. Zift conjoins the narratives of communist construction and ideological coming of age with dark images, plots, and characters à la Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain. The mix is further aided by nods to the Bulgarian, Russian, English, and French literary and intellectual traditions.

Zift evokes the hard-boiled characters and settings of American detective fiction of the 1930s and film noir of the 1940s. The novel follows the nocturnal adventures of Moth, the first-person narrator, just released from the Central Sofia Prison after doing time for twenty years for a heist gone wrong. Once out of jail, Moth goes after the mysterious carbon-ado diamond which he and his two accomplices were about to steal twenty years earlier when Moth was caught red-handed. The novel traces Moth‘s quest for the diamond through Sofia‘s streets, boiler rooms, bars and backyards and his bizarre encounters along the way. The chiaroscuro of the winter city, cold and shadowy, looms large as the backdrop of a film noir. Accordingly, the novel‘s slippery femme fatale and Moth‘s former lover, the night club singer Ada, straddles several literary and film characters (Hammett‘s Brigid, Cain‘s Cora or Phyllis, Charles Vidor‘s Gilda) as easily as she steps in and out of her gowns, while the elusive black diamond drives the plot just as "the black bird" motivates all action in The Maltese Falcon. But Moth is no Sam Spade – he gets poisoned early in the novel and walks through the city a doomed man.

Moth – in Todorov‘s perverse twist of the noir genre – is a character steeped in communist ideology and traversing the map of a distinctly communist city. Moth‘s character is a literary pastiche of the Soviet heroes who populate novels such as Nikolai Ostrovskii‘s How the Steel Was Tempered (1932), one of the master narratives of socialist realism (Moth‘s real name is Zhelyazkov – from the Bulgarian word "zhelyazo" or "iron"). Like those he-roes, he perfects his mind in jail by reading canonical texts and trains his battered body to withstand pain and privations. Caught and convicted in a pre-communist Bulgaria, Moth is already in jail when the communists seize power on September 9, 1944, and in prison he converts to the new system of thought and life. In this way, Moth straddles political regimes and cultural eras, skipping through time as if on his "Communist Time Machine" – the propaganda art-work that he installs in jail and that secures his early release into the night of December 1963.

Moth‘s flight through Sofia takes him to two key sites of communist power – Georgi Dimitrov‘s mausoleum and the nearby party headquarters. Early in the text Moth informs the reader that in 1949 he took part in digging the foundation pit of the mausoleum; when he faces the imposing structure, he is awed by the ideological power emanating from it and from the embalmed body of the communist leader within. Moth not only partakes in the construction of Sofia‘s communist space, he also becomes the ideal subject of the communist state. And yet, by subtly recalling Andrei Platonov‘s The Foundation Pit (1930), the disturbing dystopian narrative about Soviet construction, Zift confers to Bulgaria‘s communist reality a nightmarish status. In fact, the novel transforms the city itself into a permanent construction site through the vocabulary of building materials, zift in particular.

Zift carries both a communist and noir aesthetic and thus unites the novel‘s two generic strands. Zift is a black resin or asphalt used for its binding properties and belongs to the linguistic register of industrial construction and metallurgy. It is zift, according to Moth, that binds the yellow bricks of the pavement surrounding Dimitrov‘s mausoleum and the Party headquarters. As the novel‘s title, zift evokes another master narrative about Soviet construction, Gladkov‘s novel Cement (1925). In a hard-boiled manner Moth chews continuously on a ball of zift to signal his streetwise toughness; and it is the ball of black zift that holds the resolution of the black diamond mystery. Further, Zift‘s thick blackness seeps through the menacing noir city when Moth exits the prison and enters the "nebulously thick freezing night" where dusk is "streaming down the joint‘s walls like molten asphalt" (10). Even people are described as industrially manufactured bodies: "a tin gaze, ears of porous cast iron, a sheet-metal figure, a quarry jaw, skin the hues of zinc and lead…" (11). Methodically ingesting the resin, Moth claims that zift has embalming properties and that "mummy comes from the Arabic for zift" (109). It is precisely at this point that zift binds together the hard-boiled body with the embalmed communist body and roots it firmly into the communist-noir city‘s pavement glued with zift.

The novel‘s language poses a challenge to both reader and translator: fraught with allusions, puns, intertextual references and shifts in discourse, it calls for constant alertness. The text spans the vocabulary of industrial construction, manufacturing and metallurgy, the official parlance of communist ideology, the graphic twists of street jargon and the lyric eloquence of a poet‘s letter, as well as various direct or indirect quotations. In a Nabokovian fashion (Ada is after all the title of Nabokov‘s perhaps most ambitious work), Zift begs for a rereading (on my second reading, I detected modified quotes from the Bulgarian poets Geo Milev and Nikola Vaptsarov). Joseph Benatov‘s English translation deftly negotiates the challenges of the text‘s variegated lexicon, rhetorical figures and discursive oscillations. Interestingly, the English translation differs significantly from the Bulgarian original in one important de-tail: the resolution of the diamond mystery that concludes the novel. The changed ending in the English version, however, corresponds to the denouement of the novel‘s film adaptation, Zift (Gardev, 2008). Todorov, who wrote the screenplay for the film, has rewritten the ending of the English edition of his novel. This alignment of verbal and cinematic modes of representation further endorses the communist noir poetics Todorov has crafted.

Structured as Moth‘s written confession to the police, the novel also contains several embedded narratives – the stories told by a host of bizarre characters Moth encounters on his journey through Sofia. Each storyteller relates an absurdly comical anecdote about life in communist society (a famous actress skiing down a slope with a bare behind; a man pressing a hot iron to his ear instead of the telephone; three tons of feces getting dumped into someone‘s living room, to name just a few) that turns the novel into a parody. Inherently intertextual and overtly humorous, parody imitates or repeats a discourse, text or style, but with a critical difference. We can then read Zift as a parody of both socialist realism and hard-boiled fiction as well as a parody of itself and the hybrid genre it creates.

The Complete Review

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/bulgaria/todorovv.htm

       Published in 2006, Zift is a product of the post-communist era, but, billed asSocialist Noir in its English translation, it is set firmly in Bulgaria's previous eras. The story is narrated by Lev Kaludov Zhelyazkov, better known as 'Moth', and it begins in the late 1963, on the day he has been released from prison after serving some two decades for a murder he did not commit. Immediately, he tries to catch up with his past -- in particular Ada, the woman he left behind -- and the past catches up with him. 
       Moth was jailed after a botched robbery he arranged with Ada and his partner, Slug. They planned to rob the jeweler Ada worked for, but it didn't work out well; Slug escaped and Moth took the blame -- and the big diamond that was supposed to be on the premises hasn't been seen since. 
       While Moth was in jail Slug opportunistically embraced what the new regime offered, and now wields considerable power. As soon as Moth is out of jail Slug picks him up, and plots to get him to reveal the whereabouts of the diamond that he's been pining for these two decades. Moth escapes his clutches, more or less, and finds Ada -- who hasn't been able to escape Slug entirely all these years, and who is also interested in that diamond. 
       Zift is a play on the pulp noir genre, in book and film, and Todorov has fun playing it to the hilt, unashamed to present scenes such as:

     We fell quiet, as if each of us had started counting silently to infinity. All of a sudden the doorbell rang, then it rang again, and I gave her a questioning look. 
     "That's the postman," she uttered calmly. "He always rings twice."

       The entire novel is a pastiche of pulp, with borrowed plots (from the 1950 film D.O.A. to every hardboiled black-and-white noir they ever made, it can seem) layered one on the other. Moth is the epitome of the noir hero, the weary, philosophical loner who briefly gets the woman but has to deal with double-dealing all along the way and who, even if he gets the last laugh (of sorts), can only take limited pleasure in that. As he describes his nickname:

     The moth -- just imagine how it flies: not flying, really, but zigzagging erratically. If you try to sketch a moth's flight, you will end up with an unintelligible drawing. My life paints a similar picture -- anyone's life, really.

       Jailed during the Second World War, as Bulgaria was in complete political turmoil -- the botched robbery takes places around the time of the death of Tsar Boris III, which led to the coup by the communist Fatherland Front in 1944 --, Moth missed Bulgaria's transition into a workers' state and, while he was certainly criminally-minded before, he never took the turn Slug did; indeed, jailed during this entire period he clearly is meant to be presented as having stayed, in a way, 'pure.' (The date of the crime is, however, the most problematic part of the book: it seems unlikely that the communist authorities, once they had consolidated power, would have left him jailed for two decades: he would surely either have been summarily executed, or released much sooner (having done nothing worse than murder some bourgeois jeweler) .) 
       The zift of the title is a piece of bitumen Moth likes to chew on; it's among the few possessions that he can reclaim as he leaves prison. As he notes at one point:

"Mummy" comes from the Arabic for zift -- black bitumen, a powerful resin with embalming properties.

       For all its properties -- his piece of zift is just as good now as it was all those years ago --, time hasn't stood still while Moth was in the slammer, and if the triangle of characters is still the same, they've shifted shapes and essences in the meantime. You can't go home again, and past is past -- but none of the three can quite let go. 
       Todorov offers an amusing sort of Eastern European super-noir -- the genre boiled down to its essences, and then every one of these used in shaping this variation on all the themes and tropes. It's amusing to see the borrowings in the new setting, and it's quite an accomplished novel in that sense alone, as his feel for American noir is better than that of most Europeans. Like most noir, Zift is rushed and simplistic and over-the-top, too -- but it's still a solid little piece of pulp, with a nice Bulgarian spin to it. 

- M.A.Orthofer, 17 September 2010

Review of Contemporary Fiction

Michael Pinker

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100155050&extrasfile=942FC53D-1D09-67E0-436EB138FBA6A399.html

Zift is raw asphalt, chewed by aficionados like gum; as a slang term it also means dirt or shit. Lev Zhelyazkov, nicknamed "Moth," antihero of this fast-paced novel, chews it incessantly while involved in a long night of catching shit upon his release from a Bulgarian prison, serving twenty years for a murder he didn't commit. As soon as Lev is out, clad in an overlarge, dated gabardine suit, two security types accost and carry him off to another sort of prison, in a grimy bathhouse, for no apparent reason. The rest of Todorov's novel relates Lev’s more or less ineffectual attempts to repel his captors, rejoin his wife, and learn about the son they had, who was born and died during his father’s imprisonment. At length, fleeing the bathhouse, Lev traverses a sordid world amid the streets of Sofia, retracing the convolutions of the murder scenario, during which he stumbles upon Slug, his slimy accomplice in the jewel heist that went wrong, who is now an apparatchik himself, bent on rubbing out his erstwhile partner in crime. In another opportunistic meeting Lev discovers his wife, for whom he took the murder rap, singing in a bar. Although they swiftly, passionately reconcile, soon afterward Lev must unravel a succession of stories about what she did, where she was, and what happened to their son during Lev’s enforced estrangement. This hunt takes on added importance when Lev finds that he has been dosed unwittingly with a poison for which there is no antidote. Assailed by time, the cold, and betrayal, Lev finally meets, in the cemetery where his parents and child are buried, a crew of philosophical gravediggers whose hearty optimism disarms his world-weariness. Todorov’s raw, hard-boiled parody takes dead aim at noir and leaves it gasping for breath. 

WDR 3

Passagen, 5.04.2011

Die Story ist denkbar schlicht: Zwei junge Männer und eine Frau – die Ganoven

Motte, Made und Ada – planen einen Überfall auf einen Juwelier. Ada erkundet

die Lage, dann steigen die Männer ein. Doch plötzlich erscheint der Juwelier. Er

wird erschossen, ein Täter flüchtet, der zweite Mann – unser Ich-Erzähler Motte

– kommt ins Gefängnis. Die Beute aber, ein schwarzer Diamant, bleibt seit dem

Raub verschwunden. – Nach zwanzig Jahren Haft wird Motte entlassen, er ist

38, und er hat nur noch 24 Stunden zu leben. Made, der Kompagnon von einst,

entführt und foltert den Erzähler; dann gibt er ihm ein schleichendes Gift, um

das Versteck des Diamanten zu erfahren. Aber Motte kann sich befreien und

flieht durch eine labyrinthische Stadt. Er sucht und findet Ada, die Liebste von damals.

Ada – auf Bulgarisch heißt das „Hölle". Der Erzähler hatte einen

anderen Namen für die Geliebte. Voller Wehmut denkt er zurück.

Zitat 2 (Sprecher 1)