The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov (review)

Georgi Gospodinov's The Physics of Sorrow, translated by Angela Rodel, is a genre-bending novel laid over a central theme: the myth of the Minotaur. Gospodinov's work emerges from the postmodern tradition of reflecting on and reinventing myths, a tradition seen in works like Donald Barthelme's Snow White, Italo Calvino's The Nonexistent Knight and the Cloven Viscount, and Jorge Borges's Labyrinths.

In that way—with its ties to postmodern mythologizing and occasionally self-indulgent metafiction—Physics feels somewhat dated, as though it might fit more comfortably alongside Calvino than amongst contemporary literature. However, Gospodinov's poignant writing overcomes the cobwebs of postmodern tradition with tremendous success. Unlike many of his predecessors, Gospodinov blends so much of the deeply personal into his work that what might otherwise feel like a novelty of a structure becomes the only means of expressing what it is he aims to explore.

In this novel, Gospodinov explores what lies beneath the surface, a "secret sorrow" that can be accessed only by the narrator's supernatural empathetic ability to enter into the memories and dreams of others:

Sometimes—at the same time—I am a dinosaur, a fish, a bat, a bird, a single-celled organism swimming in the primordial soup, or the embryo of a mammal, sometimes I'm in a cave, sometimes in a womb, which is basically the same thing—a place protected (against time).

Like the Minotaur lost in the labyrinth, the narrator pulls the reader through the many "side corridors" of memories, blending genres along the way: at points it's fiction, then metafiction, then memoir, then myth. It even includes a series of lists, such as "Things in the Body That Look Like Labyrinths" and "Available Answers to the Question of How Are You." The narrator obsessively tries to a catalog every possible experience in every possible way and his inevitable failure to do so haunts him:

Why didn't I write down more names? The names of all the places I've been. The names of cities and streets, names of foods and spices, women's names and men's names, the names of trees—a memory of the purple jacaranda in Lisbon, the names of airports and train stations . . .

The reader follows along as best as he or she can as the narrator tries to discover through the darkness the uncertain history of his grandfather, and ultimately, the history of himself.

Gospodinov swings the narrative back and forth through time and space, trying to capture as much as possible, from Ancient Greece, to war-torn Bulgaria, all the way to modern-day Arkansas. Yet the story always returns to the symbol of the Minotaur: on the surface, a much-maligned monster, but in the narrator's view, a creature that has been abused and abandoned, lost in the dark, only to be murdered by those surface-dwellers who can't possibly understand him.

The Minotaur acts as the perfect symbol for Gospodinov's "secret sorrow." One half of him is an animal, an extraordinarily valuable trait to the narrator, who describes animals as having the purest understanding of emotion, unencumbered by language. But the Minotaur still has a human half. While the narrator seems less enamored of humans (at one point, he refers to them as "the animal apocalypse"), he still sees that deep below the Minotaur's animal groans lies the body of a human being—a child, in the narrator's retelling of the myth—who is abandoned. The Minotaur is not completely divorced from humanity, and the narrator stresses that: killing the Minotaur isn't the slaying of a monster; it's a murder.

That human half is also important in tying the allusion back to the narrator's grandfather, who was abandoned as a child and locked in a basement for several months. Gospodinov adds another layer to this by having the narrator lock himself in a basement as he traverses his family history and tries to come to an understanding...