Nuntempaj Rakontoj
Yet again I was bored on a train, and because I seemingly never learn from my mistakes, I decided to embark on another Esperanto ebook. There were plenty of translations of English-language works I already knew well which I could have chosen, but I decided to be brave and opt for something which I’d never heard of. That something turned out to be “Nuntempaj Rakontoj”, a collection of short stories by a Bulgarian author called GP Stamatov. Happily, the collection starts with an explanatory note, informing readers is a famous Bulgarian author who specialises in stories with a satirical twist, and that these tales have been translated from the Bulgarian by Ivan Krestanoff. So, this time there is no room for confusion as to nationality 
I’m always a bit luke warm about collections of short stories, as I generally find they are either really good or really bad, with more of an average tendency towards the bad! There were five in this ebook: ‘Vilao apud la maro’, ‘En la tombejo’, ‘La estinteco’, ‘Pri unu anguleto de l’animo’, ‘Du talentoj’. Some of them were better than others. Most of them revolved around two characters; a man with a dumb wife or a wife with a dumb man 
‘Vilao apud la maro’ is the one which appealed to me most. It tells the story of a pair who are seemingly ridiculously in love and spend all day whispering sickeningly sweet nothings in each other’s ears. The girl presses the guy to take her to his family home which he has always been talking about and which now belongs to him, and so they set out on a journey. He is obviously very rich, as he shows her a beautiful villa by the sea with amazing grounds, all of which belongs to him. But after a certain amount of time spent listening to her raptures about how all this is theirs, his face starts to fall.
They stop for a rest in a little cave, and she begins to notice something is wrong. She starts to question him, and he is evasive. Finally he tells her that he has a big secret, but he can’t be more explicit because if he does she will leave him. She is understandably quite concerned and presses him for more information. Eventually it transpires that he once had an older brother who should have inherited all this land. One day, sitting in this very cave, he deliberately poisoned him, and that is why the whole lot now belongs to them 
The girl is horrified, and yet she is so in love with the guy that she promises him it doesn’t have to be a problem. She doesn’t hold it against him, they can sell all this and move abroad to a place where the memories of the dreadful deed won’t haunt him. They walk hand in hand for a bit, and then it becomes apparent that something else is wrong. He tells her how glad he is that she loves him so much…
…and goes on to confess that it was all a lie. He never murdered anyone. However, he does have a brother who is very much alive and the true owner of all this property. The idea that it belonged to him was just a dream, and he actually has no money at all! His idea in telling his girl the lie about the murder was that if she loved him enough to forgive him for killing his own brother, she would certainly love him enough to forgive him the lie about the property. His cynical calculation doesn’t pay off, and she leaves him.
Jolly good thing too, he was a right prat. It’s one thing to forgive someone for a murder, but to forgive someone for an attempt to be so manipulative is quite another matter. I’m not sure whether that was the moral the author actually intended to be taken; possibly the point was that the girl was so mercenary she left him when she knew he was poor, although she was prepared to stay with him as a rich murderer, but I prefer my own interpretation
It’s interesting, what causes people to split up with other people. I nearly started a thread on it in the JEB forums the other day after I said at my boyfriend’s blog that I’d leave him if he became an evangelical Christian. I felt a little mean saying it, and in the end I didn’t start a thread because I figured no one else apart from us too would post in it and it was in danger of becoming a little too personal. It interested me though as a discussion theme, because there are so many things which sound worse on the surface but which for me wouldn’t spell an automatic end. I wouldn’t automatically dump him if he cheated on me, or if he hit me, or even necessarily if he did commit a murder. Not that I would automatically not dump him either, but those are circumstances which would have to be addressed on their own individual merits. For me there are only four circumstances which I can think of right now which would cause me to end the relationship at the drop of a hat, one of which relates to the religion point… but I suspect my views on such matters differ significantly to those of a lot of other girls
Hmmm. Anyhow, I rather liked these stories. They’re not going to set the world on fire, but they were pleasant, easy to read, and made me laugh or gave me pause for thought alternately. I would recommend them as a free way to pass the time, although I wouldn’t have read them if I’d had to pay.
Tags: Esperanto, nuntempaj rakontoj