Name: The Physics of Sorrow
Rating: 4.25 (10 reviews)
ISBN: 9781940953090

Georgi Gospodinov

Shortlisted for prizes around the world, Georgi Gospodinov's thrilling new novel is about physics, myths, and the power of stories.

The Physics of Sorrow

BC Hark

Let’s wait here for the souls of distracted readers. Somebody could have gotten lost in the corridors of these different times.

How about from the fair in 1925? Let’s hope we didn’t forget anyone at the mill. So where shall we set out for now? Writers shouldn’t ask such questions, but as the most hesitant and unsure among them, I’ll take that liberty. Shall we turn toward the story of the father, or continue on ahead, which in this case is backward, toward the Minotaur of childhood . . . I can’t offer a linear story, because no labyrinth and no story is ever linear. Are we all here? Off we go again.

Reminded me of Everything Everywhere at Once. 

God is an insect who watches us. Only small things can be everywhere.

Even if you weren’t born in Versailles, Athens, Rome, or Paris, the sublime will always find a form in which to appear before you. If you haven’t read Pseudo Longinus, haven’t heard of Kant, or if you inhabit the eternal, illiterate fields of anonymous villages and towns, of empty days and nights, the sublime will reveal itself to you in your own language. As smoke from a chimney on a winter morning, as a slice of blue sky, as a cloud that reminds you of something from another world, as a pile of buffalo shit. The sublime is everywhere.

The answer to the question how are you? A vexing one that encompasses so much more than it asks or that can really be answered. 

I stopped going out, stopped answering my phone, I started shopping at different stores so as to not fall into the trivial acquaintances of everyday life. I wracked my brain trying to hammer out defensive responses. I needed a new Shield of Achilles against bullshit. How to come up with an answer that doesn’t multiply the banality, that doesn’t get bogged down in clichés? An answer that doesn’t force you to use ready-made phrases, an answer that doesn’t lie, but which also doesn’t reveal things you’d rather not reveal. An answer that does not predispose you to entanglement in a long and pointless conversation.

What spurious tradition of etiquette has given rise to it, how has it slipped through the centuries, that hypocritical question. “How are you?”—that is the question. (The sublime “To be or not to be” has been replaced by that pitiful inquiry, now (loved) 

In the style of Fernando Pessoa, in the style of lists, in the strangeness of using I, in inhabiting others we are born, a multiplicity voices wrapped up into one. 

This book is not quite a full on Pessoa masterpiece, at times it made me recall the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. At times it beckons you to a view of the world so unique. 

It shows you youth and age and socialism. It shows you your own DNA. 

I can't say that it was always holding my attention, but the unique character of the book in being something altogether different is just as well for me at 5 stars, though it could be 3 or 4.5 at times, depending on the content. A strange gem nonetheless. I can't claim that I parsed it all or even got it all, much like with Pessoa the corridors lead you down different paths of thought, which can make the reader get lost so quickly, he loses his footing and cascades into another life forgetting the story he was in and why he was there. 

In the style of Fernando Pessoa, in the style of lists, in the strangeness of using I, in inhabiting others we are born, a multiplicity voices wrapped up into one. 

This book is not quite a full on Pessoa masterpiece, at times it made me recall the film Everything Everywhere All at Once. At times it beckons you to a view of the world so unique. 

It shows you youth and age and socialism. It shows you your own DNA. 

I can't say that it was always holding my attention, but the unique character of the book in being something altogether different is just as well for me at 5 stars, though it could be 3 or 4.5 at times, depending on the content. A strange gem nonetheless. I can't claim that I parsed it all or even got it all, much like with Pessoa the corridors lead you down different paths of thought, which can make the reader get lost so quickly, he loses his footing and cascades into another life forgetting the story he was in and why he was there. 

Оставих твърде много време между завършването на книгата и писането на ревю, защото исках да го напиша и на български, и на английски, та вече мислите ми по въпроса не са чак толкова ясни. Но ми хареса - повече от "Времеубежище" дори. Някак по-ясна е в идеите си и изказа си, въпреки че е също толкова богата на подтекст и литературни и културни препратки. (Дори бих казала, че липсата на бележки под линия в английското издание може да направят книгата твърд езотерична за чуждестранни читатели. Но нито е първата, нито последната преводна книга, на която й се налага да се довери на читателите си колко от културният й контекст ще разберат). 

I left too much time between finishing the book and writing this review - as I wanted to write it in both Bulgarian and English - so my thoughts regarding the novel are no longer as clear. But I liked it - maybe more than "Time Shelter". I found it clearer in its ideas and their expression, even though it is just as rich in its metatext and literary and cultural references. (If anyhing, I would say that the lack of footnotes in the English edition might make the book too esoteric to non-native readers. But it is not the first nor last novel in translation which has to trust the extent to which its readers will graps its cultural context).

Оставих твърде много време между завършването на книгата и писането на ревю, защото исках да го напиша и на български, и на английски, та вече мислите ми по въпроса не са чак толкова ясни. Но ми хареса - повече от "Времеубежище" дори. Някак по-ясна е в идеите си и изказа си, въпреки че е също толкова богата на подтекст и литературни и културни препратки. (Дори бих казала, че липсата на бележки под линия в английското издание може да направят книгата твърд езотерична за чуждестранни читатели. Но нито е първата, нито последната преводна книга, на която й се налага да се довери на читателите си колко от културният й контекст ще разберат). 

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I left too much time between finishing the book and writing this review - as I wanted to write it in both Bulgarian and English - so my thoughts regarding the novel are no longer as clear. But I liked it - maybe more than "Time Shelter". I found it clearer in its ideas and their expression, even though it is just as rich in its metatext and literary and cultural references. (If anyhing, I would say that the lack of footnotes in the English edition might make the book too esoteric to non-native readers. But it is not the first nor last novel in translation which has to trust the extent to which its readers will graps its cultural context).

Tarlan Asadli

"Aya, at three and a half, draws a picture of me in pen. She hands it to me, takes another a look at me, thinks of something and quickly takes the paper back. I forgot to draw those lines on your forehead, she says. And thus we age."

Gary Homewood

The Minotaur myth as organising image in a poetic family history/autobiography. Rambling, digressive, vivid.

The Physics of Sorrow

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