Backlist: A Fly's Eye View

Multifaceted Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, a poet, playwright, critic, and editor whose Natural Novel (2005) has been widely translated, followed up that well-received fiction debut with a short story collection that, while easily as strong, managed to slip under the critical radar in America when it was first released in 2007. And Other Stories, long-listed for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award in its year of US publication, builds on Gospodinov's accomplishments in his first book of fiction and marks him as an author who should not be a stranger on this side of the Atlantic.

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Readers of And Other Stories will find themselves familiar with some of Gospodinov's conventions. He writes in short short mode (two to five pages per story), neither shies away from nor overindulges in metafictional tricks, and leans strongly toward the absurd. We can find these qualities in many works of contemporary innovative fiction, where they have become the most commonly accepted tropes. But in this literary environment, where writers often seem on the lookout for situations absurd enough to innovate and/or wordplay with, Gospodinov's work distinguishes itself by not having to look for the absurd at all. This is partially the result of geographical and historical happenstance, as Gospodinov came of age in Bulgaria just as communism fell apart throughout Eastern Europe. (The twentieth anniversary of the Berlin Wall's demise is in 2009.) That backdrop pervades the component parts of And Other Stories—whether they take place in the cryptic city streets of Sofia or in Bulgaria's country villages—and ensures that the collection resonates strongly with its historical moment.

This quality in Gospodinov's work is not attributable entirely to geographical and historical happenstance, however; we must also credit his craft and his attentiveness to character. He is particularly sensitive to a species of individual whose moment has come and gone, but who must continue to keep on living—a Beckettian "I can't go on, I'll go on" essence that blends seamlessly with the natural absurdities of their post-communist surroundings. Many characters in And Other Stories come across as Bulgarian Everymen, muddling through the reverberations of history without much clue about where they belong, and they come in all ages and circumstances.

Some also have the intriguing habit of disappearing from their own lives (and, seemingly, from history) as they give their stories to the page. In "The Last Gift," for example, an indigent man makes speeches in front of a security camera that he believes is broadcasting him on the eve of the millennium—this is, to all appearances, his final earthly act. In "A Living Soul," an old man who is the last survivor of his native village unwittingly sets the place on fire after falling asleep while making a confession to his dead best friend's gravestone.

The old man put the bucket on the ground…and started enumerating the names of the dead: Ivanka, Kale, Tanas, Souluk, Little Dimcho, Big Dimo…he repeated them as fast as he could, the way he did every night before falling asleep. He didn't know why he was doing it, whether he wanted to warn them so that they could rise up and run away or grab their buckets and put out the fire.

The palpability of these historically rooted characters puts us in the company of an author who has a richly complex relationship to his culture and his time, and is not merely a disembodied voice looking for conundrums to explore. The characters in Gospodinov's work find conundrums sitting in their laps and then have to figure out how to live with them. The result is an engagingly human read with well-timed and authorial tricks that deepen, rather than work against, our understanding of the world he renders.

Stylistically, the collection comes across as quite self-assured in its textures, even...