THE PHYSICS OF SORROW

A web of entangled memories.

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.