The Executioner is a crime novel by Bulgaria

Bulgaria

Bulgaria , officially the Republic of Bulgaria , is a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional republic in Southeast Europe. The country borders Romania to the north, Serbia and Macedonia to the west, Greece and Turkey to the south, as well as the Black Sea to the east...

n novelist Stefan Kisyov

Stefan Kisyov

Stefan Kisyov is a novelist, journalist, playwright and short story writer. Kisyov was born in Stara Zagora in 1963. He studied at Sofia and Plovdiv universities, and also at the Sorbonne in Paris...

, about the killing of Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov

Georgi Markov

Georgi Ivanov Markov was a Bulgarian dissident writer.Markov originally worked as a novelist and playwright, but in 1969 he defected from Bulgaria, then governed by President Todor Zhivkov...

. It was published in 2003 and is the winner of the Vick Foundation

Vick Foundation

The Vick Foundation was established by Edward Vick in February 2004 to award an annual prize for best Bulgarian novel. Vick's initiative was acclaimed by those who saw in the prize a new opportunity for the Bulgarian literature after almost 15 years of standstill...

's "Best Novel of 2004".

Plot summary

The title of the novel creates expectations about a cruel murderer, but Stefan Gashtev is a funny little person who has been trying to become popular all his life. He grows up in a circus, works as a clown, studies to become a fakir, then a pilot, unexpectedly goes to prison where he gets to be the executioner. Finally he flies into Outer Space and gets back to Earth after 20 years more obscure than ever. His misadventures are so terrifying that the best-selling author Stephen-Larry King (who has a creative block) decides to use them, but he dies a poor, preposterous death. Only the "non-fictional" story of his prototype remains.

Style

The style of the book is written part fictionally, part phantasmagorically and uses existing facts, regardless of whether they are political, public or artistic by nature. It relies on vivid details, good dialogue, and on the effect of expectations going wrong, with a mixture of rough naturalism and ironical and metaphysical generalizations. The novel is written in the form of a confession, the confession of an executioner turned into a victim, and a victim, turned into an executioner.