Zift [is the] debut novel by the Bulgarian writer Vladislav Todorov which was written back in 2006, but which has finally been published in English this year. Dubbed, or subtitled, “socialist noir” Zift (the word refers to a kind of mineral pitch, bitumen, used as cheap chewing gum but is also slang in Bulgarian for “shit”) is Lev Kaludov Zhelyazkov’s account of the day after he is released from Central Sofia Prison where he has served twenty years for a murder that he didn’t commit. Lev, also known as “Moth,” was one of three partners in a botched robbery to steal a black diamond from a jeweler’s shop. The other two—Moth’s girlfriend Ada and their partner Slug—got away, but Moth was wounded in the robbery attempt and ended up taking the fall for the murder of the jeweler, who was shot during the failed heist.

Moth walked into prison in 1943, when he was eighteen. He walks out on December 21, 1963 at the age of thirty-eight. While he was inside, the world changed.

Less than a year after Moth was sentenced, Bulgaria went through what is now called the 9 September Coup d’etat, which overthrew the moribund Tsarist monarchy and put into place a socialist government. The Kingdom became the Fatherland, and Moth, moldering in his cell waiting on letters from his beloved Ada, missed all of it. The most significant change the revolution made in his life was that one day all the Bibles were taken away from the prisoners, and copies of Bakalov’s Dictionary of Foreign Words were handed out instead—as a guide, presumably, to reeducation of the prisoners along Marixst principles.

It apparently had the proper effect on Moth, whose release was authorized after he finished what he calls “my propaganda installation”—a kind of art piece put together “. . . with my bare hands, based on my own free will and conceptual design. But it cost me a great deal of effort to find and provide all kinds of badges, painted cast-iron symbols, anthracite lumps, turbine countershafts, flywheels, and other ideologically charged machine parts.”

When the authorities see the finished work, they deemed Moth to be reformed and be released into a city that Moth hardly recognizes anymore. A city that is apathetic to his existence.

As must be clear by now, Zift is part noir, part crime story, part social satire, part black comedy (extremely black), part absurdist fairy tale. “A Chinese saying has it,” says Moth at the beginning of the story, “that a plan is a dream with a target date.” Moth’s plan for release is simple: he wants to visit the grave of the son Ada bore him and who he never saw, and the grave of the man whose murder he served time for. Then he wants to catch a train to the port of Varna, get on a ship heading south, and spend the rest of his life sleeping in a hammock swinging in the breeze of some tropical island.

Moth takes about two steps away from the prison and towards his goal and is brought up short when a police car pulls up and he is hustled in the back seat by two ugly and menacing officials. And thus begins Moth’s own surreal journey through a mad city over a mad, mad night. As it turns out, the officials are in league with Moth’s former partner Slug, who has done rather well for himself under the new regime. Slug is now a major in the force, a position with enough cachet to indulge his taste for abusing power. Plus, there’s the small matter of that black diamond from the original robbery. It was never found, and Slug thinks Moth knows where it is. He’s more than willing to beat the answer out of him.

From boiler-room torture chambers in the bowels of the Turkish baths, to the sickly-lit waiting rooms of understaffed hospitals, to seedy dive bars where the faded remnants of the old city still gather to drink White Slave cocktails and watch women with too much make-up sing under flickering neon lights, Moth careens through this new Socialist city of Sofia, barely recognizing the neighborhoods he grew up in, alternately running from Slug’s minions and running towards the woman he went to prison for so many years ago—Ada, because every noir story needs a femme fatale. . .read full review