Everything Happens As It Does by Albena Stambolova

Usually things happen very quickly, just like that. What people fail to understand is that things have already happened. Their senses are only sharp enough to put them on the alert. Those more sensitive can perceive that something or other is beginning. Then they believe themselves clear-sighted and quick because they have been able to see a beginning, or whatever word they choose for it, and they start to think. Laughter rang through the forest, scattering through the snow.

Albena Stambolova's Everything Happens As It Does begins with Boris. As a child, he's sensitive and quiet, a loner, more comfortable with the bees in this hives than other people. Seeing another boy, who has died suddenly, lying in his coffin, he is "pierced by jealousy, wishing he, too, could become invisible to others." So it is strange, then, when he grows up to marry Maria, a beautiful and mysterious woman with fickle affections. From Boris and Maria, the novel expands outward, like ripples in water, to encompass a number of other characters: Maria's lonely ex Philip; their twin children, resentful Valentin and simple-minded Margarita; even their divorce lawyer, Mr. V, and his wife and daughter.

Why should these people be thrown together instead of others? Why should any group of people anywhere? Stambolova hints that there is more than chance in the connections between her characters: there is a kind of inevitability, a universe turning like a clock. Early in the book, a young Boris ventures into a woodland chapel where he has a vision of a woman with "fog-colored eyes." Only later, when Maria leaves her family and absconds into the forest to die, do we realize that she is that woman, on her way to a rendezvous with her young husband that has, in a sense, already happened.

I enjoyed Everything Happens As It Does: each of the individual characters is crisply interesting, each of them a kind of loner who is unable to enter psychologically into the world of others, though they are bound together by these universal forces. In one scene, Valentin is incensed that his sister Margarita--a kind of holy fool--has come into possession of a laptop. He assumes she must have stolen it, because how else would she get it? He follows her one day, to find out what it is she's up to, but discovers that she spends the day on buses, winning games of solitaire. The novel begins with Boris, but he's quickly shuffled away--it's Maria, in the end, who binds them together, though her love for any of them, Philip, Boris, the twins, seems in short supply. When she disappears (or dies?) it brings all the characters together into a single house, in a scene of touching grief and camaraderie. Even in her absence, it seems, Maria is the expression of that impersonal and implacable force in the world that binds people together.

With the addition of Bulgaria, my "Countries Read" list is up to 86!