It struck me, whilst reading Gospodinov’s novel, how much of the Eastern European literature I’ve read has a blog-like quality. Where the line between fact and fiction appears to be elided. Tokarczuk’s Flights, Andrzej Stasiuk, now Gospodinov. I realise it’s hardly a comprehensive list, but all the same it felt like there was a kind of pattern emerging, even if that pattern is one shaped by the whims of translators and publishers. There’s a restlessness to the format of shorter sequences, coupled with an apparent bid to create a new taxonomy of the world, one that allows for factors which previous taxonomies had not.
Gospodinov makes no bones regarding the relationship of his thoughts to the past. There’s a generational investigation into the narrator’s second world war ancestry, thereby helping to show how the war and the Soviet invasion shaped Bulgaria. But this investigation is located within a wider investigation into the human condition, where he takes the misunderstood Minatour as a central metaphor, a monster that isn’t actually a monster, just a deviant version of a lost boy. The narrator himself, a writer hidden away in a cellar, identifies with this lost boy who is also a minatour, weaving a written thread to find his way out of the labyrinth.
In truth The Physics of Sorrow is a fragmentary read, a book you can dip in and out of, following the discursive nature of the writer’s thoughts. There are Barthesian hints of other books contained within the text. An investigation into the relationship between physics and metaphysics; a history of the Soviet bloc; an autobiography. These threads are stitched together to create a baggy, quasi-novel which perhaps is at its strongest in the way it reveals the formation and spectrum of the post-communist psyche.
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