Even if the hypocritically pious world did not understand them, they did not seek its approval, nor did they need justifications. They were strengthened by the fragile balance born of humility in the fusion of their souls, minds and bodies. Although there were people who hated them, they did not feel defeated or victorious, contrary to what Confucius said that hating a person means that he has defeated you.
“From Catherine to Naples” is a novel about the strength of the female spirit and about those invisible threads that connect the past with the future. It is for women who learn, late and hard, but truly, that they are not obliged to carry someone else's pain as their own destiny.
“I write about the darkness in man,” summarizes Vesela Lulova Tsalova in one of her interviews. But her new novel is not just a dark, multi-layered family saga, but an apotheosis for women as history rarely allows itself to acknowledge them: wounded but strong, contradictory, searching for themselves beyond the roles that have been imposed on them.
Fate here is not an external force. It is a compulsion to repeat. With the figure of Katerina, painfully familiar truths unfold – how a woman’s body and life can be appropriated, defiled and locked into someone else’s decisions. However, this is not a story about submission. Different generations of women carry not only the memory of trauma, but also the stubborn will to outlive it. Ruja is part of this line, but the real breakthrough comes with Vida, who refuses to be reduced to someone’s wife, someone’s love or someone’s loss. She falls apart, comes together, creates, chooses – again and again. The parallel storyline extends this gesture of freedom to the extreme. The relationship between Vida, Samuel and Zeina does not seek justification, but exists as an act of consent and autonomy – a love devoid of ownership, in which no one is someone else’s. This is radical because it is honest.
And Naples… is not a port. The city of the illusion that one can escape from oneself.