Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism by Kristen Ghodsee

Following recent interest in everyday life in the former Eastern bloc, Kristen Ghodsee offers fifteen intriguing portraits of life in post-socialist Bulgaria, with a brief detour to former Yugoslavia. Based on extensive fieldwork and personal attachment to the country (Ghodsee has a daughter with a Bulgarian), these narratives not only offer glimpses into the thinking, experiences, and practices of a number of informants from various backgrounds, but also actively reflect on the role of the ethnographer. Through her memories, the author exposes how ethnographic observation has shaped her own opinions while also being aware that her presence has affected, and even interfered in the lives of the people she describes. Thus, combined with the preface and afterword, the essays constitute a reflection on the economic and social reasons for the increased nostalgia for socialism in Bulgaria. The book's scholarly title and publication by a major academic publisher may come as something of a surprise to readers; the author herself notes that 'this is not a book intended for my scholarly peers' (p. xiv). Instead, Ghodsee addresses students and a more general audience, which accounts for the highly readable quality of her writing, as well as the occasionally overly didactic tone. The content of the book itself is marked by similar contrasts, purporting in the preface to be a collection of ethnographies, but straddling the boundaries of ethnography, memoir, travelogue, and fiction. The book thus rests on a number of different aims and positions, which make it engaging, but at times rather difficult to navigate. Four of the fifteen short chapters bear the subtitle 'Ethnographic fiction', printed obscurely in small letters in the top right-hand corner of each of the title pages. Although possibly the fault of the publisher rather than the author herself, this may cause some confusion. The author's decision to publish fiction alongside more traditional ethnographic writing is certainly a refreshing move that questions the boundaries between the remembered and the imagined, although it is perhaps not emphasized enough within the book itself. The author notes in the preface: 'I like to think of this book as raw footage, shot through the lens of my perception, lightly edited through the workshop of my memory, and then pieced together on film without a script to guide the plot' (p. xiii). However, the people encountered in some of the chapters are revealed to be fictional characters only in the afterword. …