"There is something of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man here, furiously attempting to write the world before it’s all swept away... the result is a powerful toast to living."
Financial Times - Matthew Janney
"There are very few novels that appear to a seasoned reader as utterly original: The Physics of Sorrow is one of these rare books."
★ 2024-03-23
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.
04/20/2015
"A reinterpretation of ancient Greek myth, a celebration of story telling, a treatise on nostalgia and aging, a collection of insights into the nature of time, The Physics of Sorrow has it all."—Randy Rosenthal, Tweed's Mag
"[The] real quest in The Physics of Sorrow is to find a way to live with sadness, to allow it to be a source of empathy and salutary hesitation… Chronicling everyday life in Bulgaria means trying to communicate Bulgarian "sadness," which is—to the extent that these things can be disentangled—as much a linguistic as a metaphysical dilemma"—Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker
"Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov's The Physics of Sorrow unites formal experimentation with emotional resonance in a compelling exploration of how and why humans tell stories … Gospodinov ruminates on the mazelike structures of the human brain, of cities, and of books themselves … [and] juxtaposes the grotesque and the beautiful… at once concrete and transcendent … Both an intellectual game and a very human story, The Physics of Sorrow captivates."—Elizabeth C. Keto, The Harvard Crimson
"Gospodinov's THE PHYSICS OF SORROW offers up a beautiful exploration of the inescapable maze-like nature of life. . . . [it] reminds us that we must never forget that we are not alone. We must never lose sense of who we are, who we were, where we come from, and where we're going. And we must never stop sharing the resulting stories of our wondrous explorations with the world at large because we must allow ourselves to feel everything or be doomed to feel nothing at all." —Aaron Westerman, Typographical Era
"Gospodinov forces us to examine our own lives, expectations, and assumptions. He asks us to look outside of ourselves, to myth and family history and national history, to find meaning in a world that often seems cruel and cold. A mixture of grim humor, keen self-reflection, and even a bit of dogged optimism, The Physics of Sorrow is not to be missed." —Bookishly Witty
"A time-traveling empath, [Gospodinov] uses story to call us to look beyond ourselves to what can root us and give our lives meaning in a world that can seem crushingly cold and cruel." —Kristine Morris, Foreward Reviews
06/01/2015
