Book Review: The Physics of Sorrow By Georgi Gospodinov

The Physics of Sorrow
A Novel By Georgi Gospodinov
Translated by Angela Rodel
Open Letter, April 2015 (Originally published in Bulgarian in 2011)
ISBN-13: 978-1940953090
$14.95, 283pp.
Reviewed by Katherine Q. Stone

What does it feel like to be a resident of “the saddest place in the world?” In his latest novel, The Physics of Sorrow, Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov explores the popular narrative of the Balkans as the paragon of desolation—one furthered by a December 2010 article in The Economist declaring that, even statistically, there is no place on earth more depressing than Bulgaria. Translated by Angela Rodel, the novel employs the ancient Greek myth of the Minotaur to help readers navigate the labyrinth of both Bulgaria’s and the narrator’s disorienting history, with Gospodinov acting as Ariadne.

Told through a series of intense anecdotal bursts, the novel abandons the comfort of a single character’s linear narrative. Instead, the narrator (also named Georgi Gospodinov) enters other characters’ memories to access their deepest secrets and directly relive their most formative experiences—a process he calls “Embedding.” At the start of the novel, while Embedding in his one his grandfather’s memories, Georgi listens to a fair barker tell the story of his attraction, the “melancholy Minotaur.” He describes the Minotaur’s life as “A story in which eras catch up with one another and intertwine…with dead-end corridors, threads that snap, blind spots, and obvious discrepancies.” This is the same map-less route of the winding tale spun by Gospodinov.

In following these fragmented threads, the reader also experiences the rapid shifts of Bulgaria’s political history, both before and after the September 9, 1944 Socialist Revolution. The narrator recounts a scene in an elementary classroom, when his teacher asks for a word beginning with the letter G. When he answers, “God,” he is told that the word “government” is a much more appropriate fit and is reminded, “There is no God in our government!” He cites this instance as “The first of forbidden things that you could only talk about at home,” along with the book Man and Woman, Intimately, a medical tome that, when passed around a group of schoolboys, provides the first stirrings of erotic stimulation (alongside select passages from The Godfather and Bel Ami.)

Through Embedding, the narrator is subjected to extreme bouts of empathy, leading to an unofficial diagnosis of “pathological empathy or obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome.” Yet he does not confide in many about his abilities, for fear of ending up like the Minotaur: thrown into his hometown’s version of the labyrinth, the ominous “Yellow House” asylum. He wonders why he is the only person with this unending capacity for empathy. Could it be true that no one has stopped, in all the reincarnations of the myth, to consider the misery of the Minotaur, condemned to a life of solitude in the dark labyrinth, his only visitors being those he is meant to devour?

In a land renowned for its sorrow, what does happiness look like? In his novel The Museum of Innocence, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk writes, “…no one recognizes the happiest moment of their lives as they are living it…Because how could anyone…carry on with the belief that everything could only get worse.” Gospodinov also writes of the hope inherent in the elusiveness of happiness, the desire to eclipse previous moments of joy as a survival method. Hope is essential—but can it exist in Bulgaria, a place where “joy is quickly replaced by fretting”? And when is it acceptable to select the definitive “happiest moment,” and to come to terms with the reality that things will never be better than they were then? Gospodinov promises readers that “The sublime will reveal itself to you in your own language,” and takes us through what the happiest days in different lives might look like. For one character, it is the moment when he is scouted for a city basketball team, then selected to play in America. For a cab driver, it’s when a beautiful woman gets into his cab and kisses him, promising that they’ll meet again. Yet even these happy moments don’t have lasting effects. The basketball player is kicked off the team after a year. The cab driver realizes the woman never even asked for his telephone number. There are no guarantees in happy moments.

To deal with these disappointments, Gospodinov suggests travel, saying “To forget a relationship, some try promiscuous sex, I tried promiscuous geography.”, Gospodinov is our off-the-beaten-path tour guide through Germany, (“You don’t come to Berlin for fun”), Helsinki (one on a list of “Cities that look empty at three in the afternoon”), and Rome (“an abandoned city”), taking us on a lifetime’s worth of vacations in ten pages.

He also returns to his hometown, where he encounters another object of his empathy, an illiterate girl named Juliet. In love with the French film star Alain Delon, Juliet enlisted our narrator to write Delon love letters from her. One day, a letter (suspiciously written in Bulgarian and sent not from Paris, but from the neighboring town) arrived for Juliet from “Delon,” insisting that, if she could wait for him, he would marry her. She has waited for Delon, outside the theatre, for forty years.

Gospodinov has written the novel to serve as a time capsule, one that will “contain the signs and warnings, the unwritten stories.” After all, he argues, “If something is enduring and monumental, what is the point of putting it in a capsule?” The Physics of Sorrow is the tale of the sole archivist of a world that no longer exists. Gospodinov argues that even the most devastating memories are still worthy of being recorded, making readers wonder: If we could choose only a few moments from our lives, to be shared with people we’ll never meet, which ones would we select to represent us?

Katherine Q. Stone‘s writing has appeared in Fiction Magazine Online, Cultural Weekly, and elsewhere online and in print. She is currently an MFA student at the City College of New York, and is originally from North Carolina.