Postcards from the Past

Georgi Gospodinov​ was 22 when Bulgarian communism collapsed in early 1990. ‘The end of our training,’ he has written, ‘coincided with the end of that for which we had been trained.’ In his first two novels, Natural Novel (published in Bulgarian in 1999) and The Physics of Sorrow (2011), he describes the disappointments of his generation, suddenly confronted with the fallout from free-market capitalism: it was a time when ‘more and more well-dressed people overcame their shame and reached into the garbage cans.’ In recent years he has witnessed the resurgence of nationalism, on both right and left, as satirised in his third novel, Time Shelter (2020), which in Angela Rodel’s translation won the International Booker Prize in 2023. Throughout his work Gospodinov intermingles personal memory with historical events. He is obsessed by his childhood, but even as he excavates it he acknowledges the absurdity of being nostalgic for a time of censorship and privation. The Physics of Sorrow mentions a joke that captures the communist Bulgaria of his early years: ‘We’re fine, but it’ll pass.’ In each of his books, Gospodinov finds some good reason – divorce, mental illness, the rise (again) of a form of totalitarianism – to want to escape or reframe reality.

One way he has done this is through dreams of the impossible novels his narrators, all versions of Gospodinov himself, might write. In Natural Novel, translated by Zornitsa Hristova, the narrator announces that his ‘immodest desire is to mould a novel of beginnings, a novel that keeps starting, promising something, reaching page 17 and then starting again’. In The Physics of Sorrow, which takes Daedalus’ labyrinth as a central motif, the Gospodinov figure complains that linear narrative ‘is an annulling of the possibilities that rain down on you from all sides’, whereas he, calling as supporting evidence the ‘indeterminacy and uncertainty’ of quantum physics, tries to ‘leave space for other versions to happen, cavities in the story, more corridors, voices and rooms, unclosed-off stories, as well as secrets that we will not pry into’. In Time Shelter, he writes:

Novels and stories offer deceptive consolation about order and form. Someone is supposedly holding all the threads of the action, knowing the order and the outcome, which scene comes after which. A truly brave book, a brave and inconsolable book, would be one in which all stories, the happened and the unhappened, float around us in the primordial chaos, shouting and whispering, begging and sniggering, meeting and passing one another by in the darkness.

Other mooted schemes include a book that uses only verbs and a book that consists solely of overheard stories – both imagined in Natural Novel – and, in The Physics of Sorrow, one written with invisible ink (we are given an extract from it: a blank space).

Like Borges, who preferred to allude to or summarise the visionary works he conceived rather than actually produce them, Gospodinov gives us tasting menu portions of several of these high concept novels without ever going all in. His books stand somewhere between metafiction, autofiction, essay and thought experiment. His narrators are intellectual and emotional men, well-read, a little crumpled and shambolic, much given to melancholic reflection on the past and where it’s got them. Natural Novel concerns a writer called Georgi Gospodinov who is going through a divorce after discovering that his wife is pregnant by another man. Before long, the story is interrupted by a second Gospodinov, the editor of a literary magazine in Sofia (a position the real Gospodinov held in the 1990s), who explains the way the first Gospodinov’s manuscript came into his possession and why he decided to publish it. Before returning to the original story, he reveals that he too is getting divorced and that the other Gospodinov is now homeless. The method is postmodern collage: there are digressions on pop culture and natural philosophy, riffs on toilets and Tarantino, Linnaeus and smoking, and an evocation of the boundless enthusiasms of childhood. One memory concerns Gospodinov (the first one) drinking urine after a rumour about its medicinal effects goes around his school:

The next day three or four of us had already tried the liquid (need I say that your future naturalist was one of them?) and described its taste as not particularly nasty, slightly salty and sour like seawater according to some sources or like pickle juice according to others. We knew that uric acid was the reason. Never again did we taste life so intimately as we did in childhood when every rumour was unflinchingly tried.

There are also two Georgi Gospodinovs in The Physics of Sorrow, this time for reasons of lineage rather than playfulness. The young Georgi, grandson of the elder Georgi, suffers from, or is blessed by, a rare condition called obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome, which means he can experience other people’s memories as if they were happening to him. The novel begins with Georgi inhabiting his grandfather’s childhood memory of seeing a minotaur at a travelling fair. When his grandfather tells the story, he says he chickened out and didn’t go in the tent. But thanks to his syndrome, the young Georgi knows that isn’t true. His grandfather did go in and was told a story:

an odd mix of legend and biography, honed over the course of long repetitions at fairs. A story in which eras catch up with one another and intertwine. Some events happen now, others in the distant and immemorial past. The places are also confused, palaces and basements, Cretan kings and local shepherds build the labyrinth of this story about the minotaur-boy, until you get lost in it. It winds like a maze and unfortunately I will never be able to retrace its steps. A story with dead-end corridors, threads that snap, blind spots and obvious discrepancies.

This summary is a forecast of – or perhaps a disclaimer for – the structure of the book to follow, which includes sections entitled ‘Side Corridor’ and ‘A Place to Stop’ (‘Let’s wait here for the souls of distracted readers,’ Gospodinov writes, like a kindly tour guide). The Physics of Sorrow is in part a wide-ranging essay on the Minotaur, whom Gospodinov sees as a child abused first by his parents and subsequently by myth. Interwoven with this is a range of material from art history, mythology and religion, including lists, diagrams and photographs, as well as accounts of the elder Georgi’s experiences in the Second World War and the younger Georgi’s childhood.

All this leads to a disquisition on the nature of Bulgarian sorrow, a particular strain of sadness called тъга (‘taga’). Gospodinov tries to define it in his brief memoir, The Story Smuggler (2016):

What else is peculiar about Bulgarian тъга? Does it resemble other sorrows that are hard to translate, such as Turkish hüzün, to which Orhan Pamuk has devoted so many pages? Or Portuguese saudade? Not really. Those are sorrows or melancholies of empires, of former empires; their sorrow is born of what once was owned and now is lost; they are closer to nostalgia, or homesickness for a larger world that can no longer be possessed.

By comparison, Bulgarian тъга is second-order melancholy: sorrow over the loss of something that has never been possessed. It’s the longing of my mother for Paris, which she never saw and never will see. It’s the sadness of my father, that the spring of 1968 never came to Bulgaria and never will now come. Tъга emerges where a world that has been dreamed of has been denied. In 2010, in an annual rating of countries according to their ‘happiness index’, the Economist named Bulgaria ‘the saddest place in the world’.

In The Story Smuggler Gospodinov talks about another impossible book: ‘a vast notebook in which one could jot down every moment of passing time … Once, I experimented with the idea, trying a single day and then a single hour. I wanted, even for a short while, to reach that – unattainable as it turned out – synchronicity between writing and the passing of time.’ I wonder if this would-be book was inspired by Tor Åge Bringsvaerd’s short story ‘The Man who Collected the First of September, 1973’, included in Borges’s 1976 anthology The Book of Fantasy, which describes the attempt of a man losing his grip on reality to anchor himself by trying to absorb everything that happened on that day. Perhaps another seed was planted by Borges’s own story ‘The House of Asterion’, a monologue by an uncommonly thoughtful and sensitive version of the Minotaur.

Also present in The Story Smuggler is Gaustine, a recurring character who first appeared as the author of a fabricated epigraph to one of Gospodinov’s poems, was fleshed out in his short story collection And Other Stories (2001), returns as the narrator’s friend in The Physics of Sorrow and is central to Time Shelter. Gaustine is an inventor, a time traveller, an intellectual, ‘sometimes from the 13th century, and at other times a school pal of mine in form 6C’, Gospodinov writes in his memoir. ‘But then he actually did turn up in real life.’ The narrator of Time Shelter makes this claim too: ‘Gaustine, whom I first invented, and then met in flesh and blood. Or perhaps it was the opposite, I don’t remember.’ Such paradoxes are easier to accept in a novel than a memoir: finding him in The Story Smuggler is like Nick Adams turning up in A Moveable Feast. But The Story Smuggler contains so many thoughts and episodes familiar from Gospodinov’s fiction that questions of truth and invention come to seem beside the point: the book is simply one more expression of his obsessively iterative style of production.

In the short story ‘Gaustine’, from And Other Stories, the narrator describes meeting the eponymous character at a literary seminar on the coast. Gaustine makes a living by selling what he can scavenge from old houses, while writing ‘late-19th-century fairy tales’ in his spare time; Time Shelter repeats this information almost word for word (the discrepancies perhaps due to the story and the novel having different translators; in this regard Gospodinov is better served by his more recent collaborators, Kristina Kovacheva, Dan Gunn and in particular Angela Rodel, than by his earlier translators, Alexis Levitin and Magdalena Levy). Gaustine is an adaptable tool, thanks to his unexplained ability to exist at different points in time. After their meeting, he returns home to an abandoned house in the foothills of the Balkan Mountains and Gospodinov goes back to Sofia. When Gospodinov receives a postcard from Gaustine dated 1929, written in fountain pen and ‘using all the quaint spelling conventions of that era’, he responds in kind and letters go back and forth, discussing events of the late 1920s as if they are contemporary – the question of whether France will accept the exiled Trotsky, the demonstration of a shortwave radio in Berlin – until Gospodinov tires of the game and breaks off the correspondence. Several years pass before Gaustine writes again, in a letter dated August 1939, making despairing reference to ‘the slaughter that is now upon our doorstep’. This is the point at which ‘Gaustine’ portentously ends. But in Time Shelter the story is taken up again when Gospodinov receives another letter from Gaustine sent from modern-day Zurich, inviting him to visit.

Gaustine, now a geriatric psychiatrist, is running a clinic out of an apartment in which everything, from the television to the books and magazines, the toys and bric-à-brac and posters, dates from the 1960s. The space is intended to return the sick – Alzheimer’s sufferers, mostly – to their childhoods, before reality fragmented. But Gaustine has bigger plans:

One day, when this business really takes off … we’ll create these clinics or sanatoriums in various countries. The past is also a local thing. There’ll be houses from various years everywhere, little neighbourhoods, one day we’ll even have small cities, maybe even a whole country. For patients with failing memories, Alzheimer’s, dementia, whatever you want to call it. For all of those who already are living solely in the present of their past.

This vision of people turning from the present towards the comforting fiction of the past – not only for medical reasons – is at the heart of the novel. Gospodinov has said that Time Shelter was triggered by the global rise of populism and the Brexit vote, and Gaustine’s business spreads across Europe at a time when discontent is fuelling nostalgia for perceived golden ages, a nostalgia that has metastasised into extreme nationalism. But as the novel picks up speed, abandoning Gospodinov’s digressive style for streamlined satire, it becomes a good deal shakier. Gospodinov is not a realist writer, but elsewhere he generates a recognisable reality full of concrete emblems of the past, from Neckermann mail-order catalogues and Parthenon ashtrays to brands of cigarette. In his satire, however, he is deliberately non-specific. Politicians wear national costume but the nations are left unidentified and the outfits are invented, so ‘the president of a Central European country’ wears ‘leather boots, tight pants, an embroidered vest, a small black bow above a white shirt and a black bowler hat with a red geranium’. Another elaborate outfit, this one involving a shepherd’s hat and popcorn, is worn by the deputy prime minister of ‘a south-eastern country’.

The novel’s​ imagined solution to the crisis of nationalism is a series of referendums: the population of each EU member state, as well as Brexit Britain, will vote on which decade of the 20th century it wants to return to. Political parties of various stripes see their opportunity and mount campaigns. In Bulgaria the major fight is between the Movement for State Socialism, which proposes a return to the ‘mature socialism’ of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Bulgari-Yunatsi, or Bulgarian Heroes, who disregard the vote’s rubric and propose a return to the 1870s, when rebels rose up against the country’s Ottoman rulers. All this culminates in a thirty-page section in which Gospodinov goes through the referendum results country by country, telling us which decades were in contention, which won and why. This provides all the excitement of watching an election-night broadcast in a country where you do not live.

But the novel provides plenty of opportunities for Gospodinov to display his talents as an absurdist. When a patient escapes from a time clinic we read that ‘he had leaped over not only a fence, but thirty or forty years as well.’ In another stunt, the Socialists decide to reanimate the preserved corpse of Georgi Dimitrov, Bulgaria’s first Communist leader. There are melancholic notes, too, as with the story of Mr N, a clinic resident who has been put in touch with the agent who used to spy on him in the Communist era, the only person now capable of retrieving his past. Thanks to the records this agent kept, Mr N finds himself able to recall not only momentous events such as affairs and blacklistings, but posture, clothing – details that ‘even mistresses and wives forget after a time’. ‘If anyone took the effort to read as literature all those thousands of pages written during the 1950s/1960s/1970s/1980s by all the eavesdropping and scribbling agents,’ Gospodinov writes, ‘it would surely turn out to be the great unwritten Bulgarian novel of that era. Every bit as mediocre and inept as the era itself.’ Yet this is the era that Bulgarians vote to return to. Abortion is banned, IKEA disappears and newspapers are once again cut up into squares to serve as toilet paper. Having seen what was coming, the narrator retreats to a Franciscan monastery in Switzerland, ‘where I could afford a cell with wifi’.

Fearing he is losing his mind to Alzheimer’s, he begins writing in one of Gaustine’s notebooks, ‘filled with all sorts of observations … personal notes and blank spaces that seemed to have been left on purpose’. This reversion to notebook entries allows Gospodinov to indulge in his favourite mode, a fragmentary collection of thoughts, riffs and captured moments: how to cook an egg on a newspaper, a girl who sees the past with one eye and the future with the other, a gallery of sketched faces, accounts of political assassinations, thoughts on failing neurons, encyclopedias, salt.

The balance between Gospodinov’s idiosyncratic reflections and the wider plot is restored too late for the novel to retrieve its momentum, but it reminds us that at his best he moves effortlessly between the local and global, the personal, historical and mythical. Before politics swamps the book, the narrator smokes a Stewardess cigarette and thinks about the death of his father and his own obsession with the past, which leads to thoughts of the Odyssey: ‘We always read it like an adventure novel. Later we came to understand that it was also a book about searching for the father. And, of course, a book about returning to the past. Ithaca is the past.’* Why, he wonders, does Odysseus turn down immortality and marathons of delight with Calypso in favour of ‘going back to where they hardly remember you, impending old age, a house besieged by hoodlums and an ageing wife’? To be reunited with his family, yes,

but also because of something specific and trifling, which he called hearth-smoke, because of the memory of the hearth-smoke rising from his ancestral home. To see that smoke one more time. (Or to die at home and disperse like smoke from the hearth.) The whole pull of that returning is concentrated in that detail. Not Calypso’s body nor immortality can outweigh the smoke from a hearth. Smoke that has no weight tips the scale. Odysseus heads back.

Gospodinov once told an interviewer that people assume ‘big themes’ are reserved for ‘big literatures’, or literatures written in big languages, while ‘small languages, somehow by default, are left with the local and the exotic.’ Milan Kundera, whom Gospodinov resembles in his essayistic mode, addresses the same subject in ‘Die Weltliteratur’: ‘The small nation inculcates in its writer the conviction that he belongs to that place alone. To set his gaze beyond the boundary of the homeland, to join his colleagues in the supranational territory of art, is considered pretentious, disdainful of his own people.’ But Gospodinov’s work is at its most impressive when it muddies the terms of Kundera’s binarism, zooms in rather than out, and locates the large resonances in ‘concrete, small things’.