Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, 56, won last year’s International Booker prize (with translator Angela Rodel) for his dystopian comedy Time Shelter, about an innovative dementia clinic that restages the past. His previous novel, The Physics of Sorrow, an unorthodox coming-of-age tale drawn on Greek myth and the history of communist Europe, is now published for the first time in the UK, alongside his 80-page memoir, The Story Smuggler. He lives in Sofia, Bulgaria.
What explains the fragmentary nature of your storytelling style?
I’m aware it’s not an easy kind of writing. I’ve always written on the edge of narrative expectations; I collect rejections from publishers apologising for not being able to take my work because it isn’t linear enough. But a novel doesn’t have to be a train moving from point A to point B – it can branch off, just like our thinking. I don’t know if my novels seem so stylistically radical in Bulgaria, because I have readers there who have followed my work since the 1990s; The Physics of Sorrow, which has travelled through more than 20 languages and countries, has taken almost a decade to reach UK readers.
How did the novel start life?
With the scene of a boy in the late 70s, feeling abandoned and sitting in a room as it’s starting to get dark. The parallel [that the book draws] with the minotaur of Greek mythology unlocks a strange, vast and anarchic story of the 20th century that in some ways has a lot to do with the topic of memory that surfaces in Time Shelter.
Why is The Story Smuggler, which is subtitled “a very brief memoir”, so short? Totalitarian ideologies require monumental memories of monumental things – I believe it’s important to cultivate our memory in the opposite direction, towards things that are perishable and mortal.
Both books mention your youthful interest in the sex scene on page 28 of Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather ...
People forget that under totalitarian systems there wasn’t just a deficit of goods and civil rights but a deficit of eroticism, too; this page, along with passages from a few scarce classic texts, was part of the catalogue of acceptable eroticism during our adolescence under socialism. My Spanish translator emailed to say she picked up the Spanish edition of The Godfather to quote that passage in her translation and it wasn’t there – Franco’s censorship had simply removed it. Turns out that our bashful Bulgarian socialism was more open than Francoist censorship after all; today Spanish readers are able to read that missing page of The Godfather thanks to the translation of The Physics of Sorrow from Bulgarian. Funny.
