“The Physics of Grief” by Georgi Gospodinov follows “Time Shelter.” to the United States: NPR

Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov won the International Booker Prize 2023 for his book, Temporal refuge. An English version of THE Physics of griefan earlier novel, has just been published in the United States.

Towards the end of this brilliant work, Gospodinov considers the concept of “weight” in physics. He writes: “The past, grief, literature, only these three weightless whales interest me. » This complex sentence sums up Gospodinov’s fascinating literary explorations.

Elegantly translated by Angela Rodel, The physics of grief is a fragmented novel that forms a remarkable and stimulating whole. It’s a winding maze through Bulgarian communism, art, literature, history, personal past, love, heartbreak and much more.

In the epigraph, Gospodinov evokes the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, members of the tradition in which Gospodinov writes. At the same time, he cites St. Augustine, Gustave Flaubert, and his own fictional character Gaustine, signaling readers not to take anything too seriously, but also to consider the weight of each word.

Gospodinov builds his novel around the myth of the Minotaur, a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man, captive in an underground labyrinth in Crete. There are multiple variations of the myth and multiple explanations for the birth of the Minotaur. Gospodinov analyzes a lot of it, like a gourmet chef selecting products. It examines how certain aspects of this myth are imprinted in modernity: man behaving like a beast and society “othering” those who are different.

Gospodinov’s narration is fluid. Sometimes he writes in the first person, sometimes a boy/man named Georgi (like the author) narrates, sometimes the narration is in the third person. We get a glimpse into Gospodinov’s reading and writing life. “At five years old I learned to read, at six it was already an illness… literary bulimia.” He leaves a blank space on a page, saying it was written with invisible fruit ink. “What, so that you don’t see anything?…If only I could write an entire novel with such ink.”

If there is a plot, it is made up of the arcs of several lives, including one person like the author himself and one person who may be like his grandfather. We get the characters’ memories of World War I and World War II, which could be Gospodinov’s own family stories.

The physics of grief, however, is not a novel to read for the plot. It is a book that raises thorny questions about the human condition and travels through labyrinthine digressions on subjects that consume us – life, death, social woes, war, peace, old age, youth. And perhaps above all literary creation.

For Gospodinov, time is an artifice. The present, the past and the future slide like pieces on a chessboard. A section titled “The Ragpicker of Memory” illustrates Gospodinov’s technique. Here the narrator – perhaps the author – is a journalist who writes about Bulgarian World War II cemeteries. He travels through Serbia on the roads that his grandfather “traveled on foot through the mud in the winter of 1944”, before stopping in Harkány, Hungary, to interview a man who lives in the house where his grandfather father was stationed during the war.

The man comments on his mother, an old woman present at the interview, as an opportunity to explore memory: “Her memory is a rag, I feel her opening the long locked drawers… she must go through more fifty years, after all.

The man is uncomfortable with his mother’s silence. He asks her something. “She turns her head slightly, without taking her eyes off me (the narrator). This could pass as a ticking clock, a negative response, or part of her own internal monologue.” The man notices that since his mother had a stroke, his memory is no longer there.

But the narrator has a different experience. He ignores the words of his interlocutor, certain that she recognizes him because he looks like his grandfather.

The narrator travels through time to describe how beautiful this woman was when she was young and how much her grandfather loved her. Even though the narrator was not there, he describes what she looked like and what she wore, projecting her grandfather’s love story – which may or may not have happened – as her own.

Even though the narrator and the old woman have “no language in which we can share everything”, her eyes say in “impeccable Bulgarian”: hello, thank you, bread, wine … I continue in Hungarian: szep (beautiful)…as if I were transmitting a secret message from my deceased grandfather.”

Who really lived this love story and who is the narrator? The passage can be read as a linear story, until the reader stops to consider the enormous gap between the moment of the interview and that of the love story.

The book claims to be about grief, and it is. Grief runs through life in many forms: heartbreak, abandonment, regret, guilt. For this reader, Gospodinov’s multifaceted considerations of human (and mythical) grief are reason enough to read the book.

Gospodinov writes at one point that he aspires to “keep an accurate catalog of everything.” We have the impression that he almost succeeded in this innovative and captivating novel.

Martha Anne Toll is a DC-based writer and critic. His first novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for finely crafted fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. His second novel, Duo for oneexpected to be released in May 2025.