Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov won the 2023 International Booker Prize for his book, Time Shelter . An English version of The Physics of Sorrow , an earlier novel, has just been published in the United States. Toward the end of this brilliant book, Gospodinov considers the concept of "weight" in physics.
He writes, "The past, sorrow, literature — only these three weightless whales interest me." This complex sentence provides a summation of Gospodinov's fascinating literary explorations. Elegantly translated by Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow is a fragmented novel that coheres into a remarkable, thought-provoking whole.
It is a winding labyrinth through Bulgarian communism, art, literature, history, the personal past, love, sorrow, and so much more. In epigraphs, Gospodinov invokes Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, members of the tradition in which Gospodinov writes. At the same time, he quotes St.
Augustine, Gustave Flaubert, and his own fictional character Gaustine, signaling to readers not to take anything too seriously, but also to consider the weight of each word. Gospodinov frames his novel around the myth of the Minotaur, a monster with a bull's head and a man's body, captive in an underground Labyrinth on Crete. There are multiple variations of the myth, and multiple explanations of how the Minotaur came into being.
Gospodinov parses through many of them, like a gourmet cook selecting produce. He considers how aspects o.
