Atanas Radenski – a Bulgarian scientist who is a success outside the country has returned to Bulgaria to present his second novel “The Rescuer”. After the fall of the totalitarian regime he left for the US and is now a professor of computer science at Chapman University, California.

Atanas Radenski says he wanted to emigrate for a long time because the regime did not allow him to travel to the West. As a researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Sofia University he frequently received invitations but he was never issued an exit visa. “That was repeated several times and I said to myself that I was not wanted in my country,” he says. And when in 1990 he received an offer for a one-year job in the US, he took his wife and three children with him and went to live overseas. There he started work on projects in scientific computing, big data, parallel and distributed computing.

“One trivial example of the scientific work I do is the weather forecast – it consists of making models which require a great many calculations so as to be able to say whether it is going to rain,” Prof. Radenski says. “Big data is used, for example, in Facebook, to characterize users’ conduct and offer them targeted advertisements. Big data computes everything hundreds of millions of people do and uses statistical models to predict what they are interested in.”

Atanas Radenski described the culture shock he experienced when faced with a different culture in his first novel “Party at the President’s”, in which the protagonist is also a lecturer at Sofia University, and just like himself, leaves for America where he gets entangled in a series of comic situations. And while his first book is about the time of transition in Bulgaria, his second book is a contemporary novel about the work of mountain rescuers and the globalized world in which cultures are inter-mingled and borders no longer matter that much. The professor wrote both books in the Bulgarian language even though he has good command of literary English which he learnt by committing to memory Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”.

“There can be no comparison with Hemingway, but I think there is one thing I do in the same the way he did,” Atanas Radenski says. “He just described what was going on leaving readers to make up their own mind what the character is feeling etc. There are no conclusions, he does not force anything on the readers and never tells you what to think – that is something that appeals to me very much, it is the way I myself write even though there are people waiting to be told what the character is thinking or what the main conclusions from the book are. But the main conclusion – that is something that is up to each and every person, just like when people look at Van Gogh’s star-studded sky. Because we each feel differently.”

Returning to Bulgaria Atanas Radenski saw a country very different to the country he left behind 30 years ago. But he does not spare his criticism either.

“It is a big problem that people are not coming back, that is why something has to change and I don’t just mean incomes,” he says. “The most important change of all concerns the social atmosphere – we need to show more tact, to be more considerate of others, to be well-intentioned, to be more tolerant – even though this is a word some people are not fond of. Some people say Americans are phony but when you are courteous, people treat you with courtesy and problems are easier to solve. Respecting other people is another thing that is essential. If I have respect for the people around me I will implement the project as it should be implemented and will not steal half of the money. That is how respect works – you do your job well and the result is good for everyone. When you have respect for others you will not steal from them.”