The striking unity of microcosm and macrocosm presents men with a model of their culture: the false identity of the general and the particular. Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce […]It has made the technology of the culture industry no more than the achievement of standardization and mass production, sacrificing whatever involved a distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system. This is the result not of a law of movement in technology as such but of its function in today’s economy. The need which might resist central control has already been suppressed by the control of the individual consciousness.

— Teddie Adorno and Max Horkheimer,Dialectic of Enlightenment

The major nearly burst out laughing from joy. But nothing on this earth lasts for a long time, and thus even joy is not as vivid the second moment as it is the first; the third moment, it becomes still weaker, and finally it merges unnoticeably with the normal state of one's soul, just as a circle created on the water by a falling pebble finally merges with the smooth surface.

— Nikolai Gogol, The Nose

The Physics of Sorrow

Reading Georgi Gospodinov is like licking a balkan madeleine, and remembering the chaos of sweetness. My madeleine isn’t as pure or elegant as Proust’s — the scent of babas lingers in the aftertaste — and this is what draws me to Gospondinov. He writes the patchwork of self-mutilations that characterize the balkans. There, for example, the usual nationalist kitsch of the background. And the stories told by grandparents that don't stop in the real but unwind into the unwitting surreality. And family tree with branches lopped off by borders. And missing uncles and secrets and promiscuous silences. There is the balkan urge to hop fences and chat up the shepherds.

One who comes from the balkans is never far from the carnival of their memories, and the loneliness of the language that carries them. A minor language cannot be dominant in the way that French or German or Russian is dominant. Against the academic impulse to be outraged by terms like "balkanization", I am tempted to embrace them, to celebrate the uncivilized hyper-awareness of fragmentation. (Peace to those who find “balkan” offensive: there isn’t really a good term to describe a part of the world that has been cut, divided, conquered, bombed, and refigured into various political constructions, many of which include large ethnic and religious minorities.)

In Gospodinov, memory is communicated by the elders who mix history with superstition, a goulash of the fantastic served up with absurdity. Absurdity is the bread that makes sense of the arbitrary shifts in power and borders. "My grandfather in me cannot decide," the speaker says, as he rambles through his grandfather's memories. "So that's where I got the indecisiveness that will constantly torment me."

Inheritance is fabulist: it comes in mixed registers and varying dictions. “According to my grandfather's memory, he didn't go in here," the speaker says of the room at the local fair exhibiting the caged boy. "But now I'm at the Fair of this memory, I am he, and it irresistibly draws me in.”

The speaker refuses his grandfather's silence about the horror he may have witnessed. Instead, he insists on imagining it further. There are many ways to deal with silences, but Gospodinov prefers to treat them mythically, to mark the way through the past as a labyrinth through which the mind elects to continue moving. This gesture is is particularly breathtaking given the fear of seeing the unsightly, the skeletons in the closet, the war records and the Shoah, the nationalism that punishes refugees.

There, at the Fair, in that "iron cage about five or six paces long," with its stool and mattress set next to its smattering of hay and bucket of water, the world is divided openly: "One corner for the human, one for the beast." The speaker isn't shocked by the fact that the Minotaur "looks like a beast, but that he is in some way human. Precisely his humanness is staggering." The familiarity of his boyishness is uncanny. "There is a sorrow in him which no animal possesses," Gospodinov writes of the freakish half bull, half-human. The man who monitors the cage "(his master and guardian)" narrates the Minotaur's origins and journey, explaining how he wound up here, in a cage, on exhibit in a Bulgarian town. The "owner" unfurls the legends that account for the Minotaur's existence. (Someone will always tell you who you are, and who you are determines what you are allowed to be.)

The freak in the cage does not speak. His hybridity is defamed by the powerful owners of language. And the story is told again, " a story in which eras catch up with one another and intertwine" so that some events happen in a recognizable present while others occur in an "immemorial past." In this story that "winds like a maze", the speaker knows he can never entirely "retrace its steps"— but to walk them again, to imagine them, is to insist on the "magic of that tale."

"The more inconceivable it looks, the more you believe it," Gospodinov says of the tale, or the space in which the ancient Greek myth meets the present. The balkans are not Proust's Paris with its heroic monuments and bourgeois aristocracy. In this land, the words of a grandfather lock up the sun at night and "drive the stars out into the sky" like sheep to pasture. In the balkans, language is magic and multiple. As in Proust, Gospodinov's madeleine evokes the child self. But Proust's childhood is relatively secure—his attachment to his mother speaks to a fear of abandonment but this fear has a different valence—it is particular to France, to his lifestyle. In Gospodinov, the madeleine is not recalled for the pleasure it brought but for the anxiety.

The Minotaur is the abandoned boy, the child left behind: this is the story that the speaker chases through every side passage and corridor in his relatives' memories.

The Minotaur does not speak for himself. Like a defenseless infant or an animal, he is narrated by others' fear of him, he is defined by their discomfort with his hybridity. Here, to be hybrid is to be born into betrayal; the inability to be simply human or animal, the inheritance of living in a halved self, makes him unable to belong. No one can recognize the Minotaur as "one of them." The Minotaur is hamstrung by unrecognizability.

Gospodinov also provides an aural madeleine. Whereas Proust extolled the church bells, Gospodinov locates memory in a sound that could be an animal or a human, a sound that straddles the divide of meaning and cannot ultimately declare itself as partaking of one world. (I thought of Birdsall's "earwitness" as the speaker mentioned the sound "Moommy?") . . . "The first cry, it’s not even a cry, it ends in a question mark." The sound emerges when the child is lost near the mill and he realizes his mother and sisters have vanished. The child, who happens to be the speaker's grandfather, doesn't know the word "abandon" yet. But "the absence of the word does not negate the fear, on the contrary," the absence of the word loads the sound and lengthens it into a sound memory that he will later recognize in the mood of the cow.

"Mooomy . . . Moooooommy. . . "

The open ellipses are paired. There is a repetitive evocation of absence, and the sense in which the child reads everything into it — and, himself into every story of those who have been abandoned.

If Proust's secret was that he could long for the past so faithfully that it provided him an escape hatch from the entanglements of the present, Gospodinov's secret is that he "can get inside other people's memories." But what he finds there is always himself, or a version of himself.

The final sentence?

“We was.”

(It should be noted that translator Angela Vogel mentioned Jennifer Croft's brilliant translation of Olga Toharczuk's Flights as an inspiring reference for her while translating The Physics of Sorrow.)

Time Shelter

In an interview, Gospodinov mentioned thatTime Shelter was the first book written in Bulgarian to be nominated for the Booker Prize. He wrote it from a growing anxiety, a palpable awareness that something "had gone awry in the clockworks of time. Brexit was on the horizon. "I come from a system that sold a 'bright future' under communism… the stakes have shifted, and populists are selling a' bright past'. I know via my own skin that both checks bounce, they are backed by nothing." The novel probes the ways humans inhabit a "deficit of meaning and future.”

The past may not be innocent, but the past makes up for this in cleverness. The past is a "discrete monster" that haunts the clinic and the European referendum. The vehicle for this narration is Gaustine, the imaginary, vision-laden friend who first came to the author fifteen years ago as a character who imagined creating "clinics of the past” in order to invent a sort of "protected time for people losing their memory.”

This relationship to the self as a memory museum permeates G’s writing from the start. His early short fiction, "Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots," is about two people meeting in an airport lounge after inventing an entire past to exist between them.

Since the temporality of Time Shelter shifts abruptly across decades of the twentieth century, Gospodinov used idioms and slang particular to eras in order to effect this motion. He hails his translator, Angela Vogel, for her creativity in translating not just the idioms but also the contextual layers of the multiple stories. Another challenge existed at the level of detail, in finding a way to translate for example the "nationalist kitsch" of various countries. Vogel also managed to translate the intertwined voices of Gaustine and the narrator without effecting a structural and grammatical shift by adding quotation marks. This is an acrobatic move, a talent that preserves the original direct speech, and an example of translation at its best.

The title,Time Shelter, is a neologism that plays on bomb shelters and tornado shelters—any spaces constructed by humans to protect themselves in the event of a catastrophe. To be protected from time is also to protect a particular view of time that becomes reified.

After mentioning an "unbelievable laughter," Gospodinov turns abruptly to recollect the memory of reading German archival newspapers and finding a photo in one paper of an elder fellow at Frankfurt University in 1952.

This fellow, Horkheimer, is holding a carnival with a paper ball dangling from its tip. And perhaps Horkheimer's awkward grin anticipates a viewer who is also an interlocutor, namely, Theodor Adorno. For there is a goofiness implicated in Horkheimer's thrall, in the physical fact of his participation of festive mass behavior and Gospodinov immediately posits Adorno's judgmental gaze. Horkheimer must be wondering whether his friend will see him, Gospodinov muses—and I wonder, separately, and in tandem, if this is because we are never performing the self more intensely than when imagining what the friend might think of us.

"All the graveyards smell like roses," says Gospodinov.

Cory Oldweiler on Time Shelter for LARB
Georgi Gospodinov as a guest David Naimon’s “Between the Covers” podcast
Georgi Gospodinov. The Physics of Sorrow, translated by Angela Rodel
Gospodinov’s Booker Prize interview
The Cure, “The Same Deep Water As You”