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 (The sublime “To be or not to be” has been replaced by that pitiful inquiry, now (loved) 

The Physics of Sorrow quotes

Join the club