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PRAISE FOR
GEORGI GOSPODINOV
“Gospodinov’s first novel blends the personal and the philosophical. . . . The resulting mixture is both earthy and intellectual.”
—Guardian
“With The Physics of Sorrow Gospodinov launches . . . himself into the premier league of European authors. . . . [Gospodinov] rises above the lowlands of novelistic commercialism and convention, saving not only himself, but literature as well—and with it, the entire world.”
—New Journal of Zurich
“Georgi Gospodinov wants to blow your mind. . . . The formal playfulness suggests Kundera with A.D.D.”
—Village Voice
“This book is madness. It is extraordinary and restless, reflective, terribly funny, jarring, as philosophical as it is poetic, microscopic and grandiose. In short: fantastic.”
—Berliner Zeitung
“Gospodinov’s novel, with its metafictional games, playful narrative fragmentation, and obligatory epigraph from Foucault, belongs more to the cosmopolitan postmodern aesthetic of Italo Calvino than its native locale.”
—Believer
ALSO BY
GEORGI GOSPODINOV
And Other Stories
Natural Novel
Copyright © 2011 by Georgi Gospodinov
Translation copyright © 2015 by Angela Rodel
First published in Bulgaria as Fizika na tagata by Janet 45 Publishing
First edition, 2015
All rights reserved
Lines from Works and Days by Hesiod on p. 145 translated by Daryl Hine, University of Chicago Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-940953-10-6
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additionally, Angela Rodel’s translation was supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
CONTENTS
II. AGAINST AN ABANDONMENT: THE CASE OF M.
III. THE YELLOW HOUSE
IV. TIME BOMB (TO BE OPENED AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD)
V. THE GREEN BOX
VI. THE STORY BUYER
VII. GLOBAL AUTUMN
VIII. AN ELEMENTARY PHYSICS OF SORROW
IX. ENDINGS
EPILOGUE
O mytho é o nada que é tudo.1
—F. Pessoa, Mensagem
There is only childhood and death. And nothing in between . . .
—Gaustine, Selected Autobiographies
The world is no longer magical. You have been abandoned.
—Borges, 1964
. . . And I enter the fields and spacious halls of memory, where are stored as treasures the countless images . . .
—Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X
Only the fleeting and ephemeral are worth recording.
—Gaustine, The Forsaken Ones
I feel a longing to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl. I would like to have wings, a tortoise-shell, a rind, to blow out smoke, to wear a trunk, to twist my body, to spread myself everywhere, to be in everything, to emanate with odors, to grow like plants, to flow like water . . . to penetrate every atom, to descend to the very depths of matter—to be matter.
—Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Anthony
. . . mixing
memory and desire . . .
—T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Purebred genres don’t interest me much. The novel is no Aryan.
—Gaustine, Novel and Nothingness
If the reader prefers, this book may be taken as fiction . . .
—Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
1 Myth is the nothing that is everything.
I was born at the end of August 1913 as a human being of the male sex. I don’t know the exact date. They waited a few days to see whether I would survive and then put me down in the registry. That’s what they did with everyone.
