Furl N. J. - The physics of sorrow

PRAISE FOR

GEORGI GOSPODINOV

Gospodinovs first novel blends the personal and the philosophical.... The resulting mixture is both earthy and intellectual.

Guardian

With The Physics of Sorrow Gospodinov launches... himself into the premier league of European authors.... [Gospodinov] rises above the lowlands of novelistic commercialism and convention, saving not only himself, but literature as welland with it, the entire world.

New Journal of Zurich

Georgi Gospodinov wants to blow your mind.... The formal playfulness suggests Kundera with A.D.D.

Village Voice

This book is madness. It is extraordinary and restless, reflective, terribly funny, jarring, as philosophical as it is poetic, microscopic and grandiose. In short: fantastic.

Berliner Zeitung

Gospodinovs novel, with its metafictional games, playful narrative fragmentation, and obligatory epigraph from Foucault, belongs more to the cosmopolitan postmodern aesthetic of Italo Calvino than its native locale.

Believer

ALSO BY

GEORGI GOSPODINOV

And Other Stories

Natural Novel

Copyright 2011 by Georgi Gospodinov

Translation copyright 2015 by Angela Rodel

First published in Bulgaria as Fizika na tagata by Janet 45 Publishing

First edition, 2015

All rights reserved

Lines from Works and Days by Hesiod on p. 145 translated by Daryl Hine, University of Chicago Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available upon request.

ISBN 978-1-940953-10-6

This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Additionally, Angela Rodels translation was supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Translation Fellowship.

Design by N. J. Furl

Open Letter is the University of Rochesters nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

www.openletterbooks.org

CONTENTS

O mytho o nada que tudo.

F. Pessoa, Mensagem

There is only childhood and death. And nothing in between...

Gaustine, Selected Autobiographies

The world is no longer magical. You have been abandoned.

Borges, 1964

... And I enter the fields and spacious halls of memory, where are stored as treasures the countless images...

Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X

Only the fleeting and ephemeral are worth recording.

Gaustine, The Forsaken Ones

I feel a longing to fly, to swim, to bark, to bellow, to howl. I would like to have wings, a tortoise-shell, a rind, to blow out smoke, to wear a trunk, to twist my body, to spread myself everywhere, to be in everything, to emanate with odors, to grow like plants, to flow like water... to penetrate every atom, to descend to the very depths of matterto be matter.

Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St. Anthony

... mixing

memory and desire...

T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Purebred genres dont interest me much. The novel is no Aryan.

Gaustine, Novel and Nothingness

If the reader prefers, this book may be taken as fiction...

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Myth is the nothing that is everything.

I was born at the end of August 1913 as a human being of the male sex. I dont know the exact date. They waited a few days to see whether I would survive and then put me down in the registry. Thats what they did with everyone. Summer work was winding down, they still had to harvest this and that from the fields, the cow had calved, they were fussing over her. The Great War was about to start. I sweated through it right alongside all the other childhood illnesses, chicken pox, measles, and so on.

I was born two hours before dawn like a fruit fly. Ill die this evening after sundown.

I was born on January 1, 1968, as a human being of the male sex. I remember all of 1968 in detail from beginning to end. I dont remember anything of the year were in now. I dont even know its number.

I have always been born. I still remember the beginning of the Ice Age and the end of the Cold War. The sight of the dying dinosaurs (in both epochs) is one of the most unbearable things I have seen.

I havent been born yet. I am forthcoming. I am minus seven months old. I dont know how to count that negative time in the womb. I am as big as an olive, weighing a gram and a half. They still dont know my sex. My tail is gradually retracting. The animal in me is taking leave, waving at me with its vanishing tail. Looks like Ive been chosen for a human being. Its dark and cozy here, Im tied to something that moves.

I was born on September 6, 1944, as a human being of the male sex. Wartime. A week later my father left for the front. My mothers milk dried up. A childless auntie wanted to take me in and raise me, but they wouldnt give me up. I cried whole nights from hunger. They gave me bread dipped in wine as a pacifier.

I remember being born as a rose bush, a partridge, as ginkgo biloba, a snail, a cloud in June (that memory is brief), a purple autumnal crocus near Halensee, an early-blooming cherry frozen by a late April snow, as snow freezing a hoodwinked cherry tree...

We am.

THE SORCERER

And then a sorcerer grabbed the cap off my head, stuck his finger straight through it and made a hole about yea big. I started bawling, how could I go home with my cap torn like that? He laughed, blew on it, and marvel of marvels, it was good as new. Now thats one mighty powerful sorcerer.

Come on, Grandpa, that was a magician, I hear myself say.

Back then they were sorcerers, my grandfather says, later they became magicians.

But Im already there, twelve years old, the year must be 1925. Theres the fiver Im clutching in my hand, sweaty, I can feel its edge. For the first time Im alone at the fair and with money to boot.

Step right up, ladies and gents... See the fearsome python, ten feet long from head to tail, and as long again from tail to head...

Daaang, whats this twenty-foot-long snake?... Hang on there you, where do you think youre going, you owe me a fiver... Well, I only got five and Im not gonna waste it on some snake...

Across the way theyre selling pomades, medicinal clay, and hair dyes.

Dyyyyyyye for your ringletsssss, brains for your nitwitssss...

And who is that guy with all the sniffling grannies gathered around him?

... Nikolcho, the prisoner of war, finally made it back home, and heard that his bride had married another, Nikolcho met her at the well and cut her head clean off, as her head sailed through the air it spoke, oh Nikolcho, what have you done... Time for the waterworks, grannies...

And the grannies bawl their eyes out... Now buy a songbook to find out what terrible mistake he made, slaying his innocent wife... A songbook hawker. Geez, what could that mistake have been?...

People, people, jostling me, I clutch the money, just dont let anybody steal it, my father had said when he gave it to me.

Stop. Agops. Syrup. Written in large, syrupy pink letters. I swallow hard. Should I drink one?...

Come and get your rock candyyyyyy... The devil is tempting me, disguised as an Armenian granny.