The Physics of Sorrow

April 20, 2015
Gospodinov's (Natural Novel) quixotic novel is part family saga, part meditation on Greek myths, and part personal history of growing up in Communist Bulgaria. Despite the challenges posed by this mix of styles and material, it's occasionally moving and points toward a book that might have been. The narrator is a Bulgarian writer who considers himself a collector of storiesâliterally, as he will often pay strangers for interesting anecdotes. He claims that as a child he could slip into others' experiences, and so when he begins to relate stories of his grandfather's youth and soldiering during WWII, he sometimes presents them in the first person. These affecting but confusing scenes are interspersed with images from the story of the Minotaur and its labyrinth. The narrator feels great sympathy toward this misunderstood "monster," and these passages are some of the best. However, the novel rambles across characters, eras, and stories; by the final quarter, the already thin pretense of a central narrative is completely set aside, and the narrator strings together a random assortment of tales and observations he's collected on his travels. Some of these stories sparkle, but the impression is of padding, and the effect is exhausting. The overall sense imparted by Gospodinov's experimental style isn't so much of having read a novel, as of having been presented with a measured amount of writing. Some of it is very fine, but too much is undisciplined and confusing.

April 15, 2024
A web of entangled memories. In this swirling, ruminative novel, translated by Rodel, award-winning Bulgarian poet, playwright, and novelist Gospodinov takes the mythological minotaur as the central figure in a metafictional narrative that leaps through time and space, from King Minos' palace to communist Bulgaria, from politics to quantum physics. Gospodinov's minotaur, though, is no monster, but rather a melancholy being, a lonely Minotaur-boy, one among a long lineage of forsaken children. The offspring of an affair between his mother and a bull, the child was born with the head of a bull and body of a human, proof of the transgression and justifying his abandonment. "There is a sorrow in him," the narrator--whose name is Georgi--observes, "which no animal possesses." The minotaur's plight of abandonment recurs: Georgi remembers being left alone in his family's apartment in the 1970s while his parents worked, feeling lonely, bored, and abandoned. "Is there a Minotaur Syndrome?" he wonders. "The history of the family can be described through the abandonment of several children. The history of the world, too." The image of a spiraling labyrinth recurs, as well; the past, Georgi realizes, "never runs in one direction." Describing himself as an "empath" able to enter the minds of others, Georgi creates a "time capsule" filled with his own memories and the "whole cacophony" of memories of his father and grandfather (another Georgi), friends and neighbors. Reflecting about the "randomness and uncertainty" of physical particles, Georgi likens empathy to a gas, or a "stray cloud," that wafts through the universe until it is "unlocked...through sorrow," and perceived by empaths like himself. "Someone," he believes, "must constantly be watching and thinking about the world so that it exists." A playful, profound meditation on storytelling and time.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.