"This is a whimsical delight." —Publishers Weekly
"An absurd romp through modern culture with a disarmingly appealing protagonist." —Kirkus Reviews
"Bonapace tells this yarn with glee, careening between genres and pop culture references, swinging at fitness culture and self-improvement all the way." —Elle
“One could say many things about Ruth Bonapace’s The Bulgarian Training Manual—that it’s a ‘romp,’ a ‘hoot,’ a ‘wild ride,’ a ‘pumped picaresque,’ etc. And they’d all be true. (I’d like to add that it’s the first book that ever made me see jacked biceps and six-pack abs as Freudian conversion symptoms.). Tina Acqualina, our narrator, idles high, ever alive to the world around her, deploying a homemade lingo that crackles like a cheek full of cinnamon chewing gum. One is gripped by this voice, in its clutches. What Emily Dickenson did for metaphysical conjecture, Bonapace (via Acqualina) does for obstreperous attention-seeking. For anyone who’s ever entered a gym (or a bar or a real estate office or a Walmart or a church, for that matter) and asked oneself, amid the clanking and grunting and preening, is all this just some vain and ultimately meaningless exercise in pure narcissism or is there some deeper psychological, sociocultural or spiritual significance at play here? Bonapace gleefully answers: Yes and Yes!” —Mark Leyner, NYT bestselling author of Why Do Men Have Nipples and Et tu, Babe
“The Bulgarian Training Manual is inventive, surreal, and powered by the unexpected. With her lively debut novel, Ruth Bonapace takes the reader all kinds of places.” —Meg Wolitzer, NYT best-selling author of The Interestings and The Wife
“This is a joyfully freakish story held aloft and borne along with the strength and dazzle of the legendary strongmen and strongwomen at its heart. Tina is a loud, raucous and unapologetic heroine of New Jersey and her stream-of-consciousness rings refreshingly true to life. I kept waiting for the ambitious arc of the narrative to deflate but Ruth Bonapace never wavered from her headlong rush forward...If it were a movie it would be independent, washed in acid colors and have a cult fan base with their own secret bicep-curl handshake.” —Helen Simonson, NYT best-seller author of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and The Summer Before the War
“The Bulgarian Training Manual is a comic novel that tells the story of blue-collar Tina Acqualina Bontempi’s quest to find her true parents and jeans that fit. With the help of a mysterious book with magical powers, Tina makes her way from her waterlogged apartment in Hoboken to a mind-bending visit to Bulgaria and back. Our heroine is the catalyst for a final contest that is part bodybuilder pose-off and part poetry slam. The novel is a sly look at self-improvement.”—Robert Reeves, founding Director of Stony Brook Southampton MFA program and publisher of The Southhampton Review
“I just love the idea of The Bulgarian Training Manual that changes people’s lives, with its hair-brained nutrition plans and strange suggestions for athletic improvement. The back-story and sub-plot of the great Eastern European strength performers is just wonderful, and hilarious. Based on careful research, the fact that these forebears of the secrets contained in The Bulgarian Training Manual were real people, only adds to the charm and the wildly absurd nature of these ‘circus performers’ lives and feats, and is worthy of a Kurt Vonnegut novel. In fact, I think he would have loved this book…This is a novel that speaks with great humor of the absurdity of our media today, and how Americans will jump on money-making schemes and fads that they believe will improve their lives.” —Kaylie Jones, author of A Soldier’s Daughter Never Cries
2024-06-11
In Bonapace’s satirical novel, a young woman embarks on a strange journey from New Jersey to Bulgaria and back again.
Cristina Acqualina “Tina” Bontempi lives in a flood-prone, illegally rented basement apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, where she barely scrapes by as a realtor. She spends her time smoking cannabis and working out with her fitness-obsessed friend-with-benefits, Steve. Her whole life changes after he gives her a copy ofThe Bulgarian Training Manual, a physical and mental fitness guide “kept secret by the Communists.” Tina dabbles in some of the manual’s self-help schemes, including a communion-wafer diet (popularized by a 14th-century nun who “helped unify Italy and brought the Pope back to Rome, all the while eating her way across Europe with communion wafers”) and “Hypno-Tan” sessions, which involve a tanning bed and hypnotism. Eventually, she realizes that, despite the “secret” nature of the manual, a surprising number of people at her gym are aware of its existence. She becomes captivated by its teachings, and she finally makes an impulsive decision to fly to Bulgaria to help “restore the Ancient Gym to its place of honor.” After she arrives, she meets a host of quirky characters, including a woman known as Baba Yaga who immediately offers her a communion wafer (“‘Eat,’ she says, ‘but never on the same day as candy corn. It is ancient Bulgarian way’”) and Mohawk, another fitness fanatic who worships the manual’s teachings—and who believes that vital pages are missing from it. It doesn’t take long before some people, including Baba Yaga, suspect that Tina may hold the key to unlocking the guide’s full potential.
As this summary indicates, Bonapace is clearly uninterested in constructing a narrative based in reality. Instead, she presents a tale of a determined protagonist on a weird, winding path toward self-fulfillment, while skewering everything from diet culture and religion to beauty trends and gym bros. Tina’s tough New Jersey attitude sometimes edges a bit too close to parody, but as she apparently bumbles her way toward enlightenment, her brash, unapologetic air makes the story of her hotheaded journey to Bulgaria worth reading. The dialogue is about as realistic as it can be, considering the utterly absurd topics that the characters discuss. But it’s Tina’s narration that proves to be the most entertaining element, as when she ruminates on whyRomeo and Juliethas endured: “It said right in the prologue that the play would take two hours. That’s a lot of useful information. Most books don’t do that…Think about it. Shakespeare is still around after all these years for a reason.” Over the course of the novel, there are plenty of moments that will make readers laugh out loud, including the manual’s guide to various bodybuilder meal plans, including a feeding tube diet, a baby food diet, and a virtual diet (in which one simply pretends to eat). It’s a wild ride that’s most fun when readers put their assumptions aside.
An absurd romp through modern culture with a disarmingly appealing protagonist.
