by Alex Carrigan
A health and fitness journey is all about changing oneself for the better. Whether it’s to lose weight, deal with health complications, or bettering your appearance, the overall goal is to become a different person at the end than you were at the beginning. The hope is for a personal arc of some kind, such as renewed confidence or self-actualization, but what if the journey leads to a such complete shift in identity and self that it’s truly impossible to go back.
The Bulgarian Training Manual is Ruth Bonapace’s forthcoming debut novel and follows Tina, a 37-year-old realtor in New Jersey who has recently begun working out with an ex-boyfriend of hers. When he gives her what he claims to be the secrets of achieving the perfect body, cultivated over thousands of years of fitness and bodybuilding training from Bulgaria, Tina’s life changes in ways that she (nor anyone, really) could have imagined. What follows is an absurd tale of dieting, poetry, family secrets, and international affairs that grow the more Tina gets in shape.
The novel is divided into three parts. The first part follows the mundane and bleak life Tina has, where she barely ekes out a living in real estate, lives in an lousy, illegal apartment, and has to reckon with all the opportunities and skills she never got to fully realize. But once the training manual falls into her gym bag, it becomes clear that Tina’s life is a lot more extravagant and important than she can realize. Bonapace illustrates this excellently with short, bizarre chapters, where Tina watched Rachael Ray share recipes involving communion wafers to recounting her first meeting with her ex, Steve, as he attempted to prevent a tree in his yard from being cut down.
It’s in Part Two, when the cabal of characters in Tina’s life spirit her off to Bulgaria for her destined role in reestablishing the fitness culture of the former Soviet state that the story truly goes into its strangeness. The first part of Bonapace’s novel was humorous in the mundane, where the picaresque chapters showed how Tina was a drifter in her life and merely had to react to the odd events that happened to and around her. In Bulgaria, she becomes the one who makes change, pushing for a renovation and reclamation of Bulgaria’s ancient gymnasium and to truly spread the good gospel of the training manual. These parts include discussions with cowboys who raise snails for escargot, a saint who leads a group of anorexic nuns, and even the Baba Yaga herself.
Throughout all of the absurdity of international bodybuilding, Bonapace’s novel is one that’s all about the work that goes into becoming the best person we can be. Yes, a lot of the actual fitness advice in the novel may be ridiculous and impractical (for example, who really can find arugula-fed escargot?), but the point is that the characters, particularly in our protagonist, are all seeking betterment and some kind of peace. Whether its to make up for a useless psychology degree or to find something to aspire to in the countryside of an eastern European nation, humans want to improve and change, and part of the struggle to do so comes from a lack of guidance.
The Bulgarian Training Manual is the strangest self-improvement book ever, but one that truly gets to the heart of what it means to change. By centering it on an everywoman whose life becomes extraordinary and odder the more she improves her health, Bonapace’s novel lets the strangeness of life remain at the forefront of a fitness journey. If muscles truly have memory, than this novel is an example of how we can’t forget all the options we have to change and better ourselves.
Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, VA. He is the author of Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has appeared in The Broadkill Review, Sage Cigarettes, Barrelhouse, Fifth Wheel Press, Cutbow Quarterly, and more. Visit carriganak.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @carriganak for more info.
