https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/feb/08/to-the-lake-kapka-kassabova-review-balkan-water-cure

What lurks beneath? Swimming and sinister stories in a thrilling ancestral quest to Lakes Ohrid and Prespa

A travel writer’s journey is often centrifugal in its bearing, from the known to the unknown; but the journey itself has the effect of inaugurating a new centre – a river’s source, a mountain’s peak, a remote island or fabled city. In Kapka Kassabova’s book, the destination is a lake – or rather two connected lakes, Ohrid and Prespa, on the Balkan peninsula. “Sometimes,” she notes, “history’s thoroughfares are disguised as geography’s outposts.” It’s a region she visited on childhood holidays, but never as an adult, sensing that she “wasn’t ready”.

As with her last book, the superb Border, the destination is also a tripartite political frontier. The journey is a search for an ancestral home, something forsaken – the “lacustrine realm” her grandmother Anastasia left as a young woman and felt agonisingly, debilitatingly drawn back to. In that sense, To the Lake is a classic account of the exile (albeit at a remove) seeking completion through return. “Geography shapes history – we generally accept this as a fact,” Kassabova writes in her introduction. “But we don’t often explore how families digest big historio-geographies, how these sculpt our inner landscape.”