And Other Stories: When Gospodinov’s Inventions Become Lives

Part of: The Deep Reader

Author Hub: Georgi Gospodinov

Spoiler notice: This review discusses the endings of several stories in And Other Stories.

“Six,” the man says, correcting the woman’s recollection of a night they never spent together. They have just met in an airport café; the marriage they are remembering has no existence outside their conversation. But the correction is already a husband’s correction, affectionate and unnecessarily exact. In “Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots,” the opening story of Georgi Gospodinov’s And Other Stories, a shared past begins to acquire authority through the small disagreements of people who were both there.

I found much of this collection clever without being left with very much afterward. Many pieces felt like sketches, or ideas for novels, and even Gaustine had lost some of his surprise because I had already encountered him in a novel. Three stories stayed with me: this invented marriage, the Christmas soul of a slaughtered pig, and the old man visiting the grave where the sweetest pears grow.

Fifty Years in the Past Tense

The airport conversation begins among damaged disposable objects. Cups have been crumpled, stirrers broken, sugar packets handled; the man briefly imagines making an art installation from the remains of their embarrassment. That private aesthetic exercise gives way to a shared one. Both are attached to other people, but they can invent what being together would have been like, and they do so in the grammar of recollection. “Do you remember” asks for recognition, inviting the other person to supply a detail rather than approve a proposal (pp. 3–5).

A hypothetical future would still require decisions: could they leave their partners, where would they live, would the relationship last? Their remembered past has already survived these difficulties. Tinfoil rings, a disapproving mother and a night in a monastery become the household stories a couple might have repeated for decades. When he corrects her five to six, he claims the modest authority of someone whose memory contains another piece of their life. The absurdity is tender because its form is so ordinary.

Then she says, “Anyway, I couldn’t have children,” and falls silent. Gospodinov records the man taking her hand for the first time, leaving her silence unexplained. The remark belongs to their fiction; the gesture belongs to the airport. As the narration moves from dialogue to gesture, their imagined marriage begins to govern their present behavior (p. 5).

The conversation continues through a broken leg, a tumor, jokes gathered to make her laugh, flowers brought every day. Their invention has begun to include the care that desire, at its beginning, cannot yet claim to have given. After the boarding announcement, the man feels old and avoids looking at himself in the mirrored door. Gospodinov explains the devastation quite openly: returning to his young wife seems impossible after fifty years away. The explanation does not exhaust the story because we have already watched two strangers learn how to comfort one another. The final age is the felt consequence of a relationship they have practiced in speech.

The Narrator Gives the Answer

The speed praised by the Complete Review sometimes becomes the haste Dimiter Kenarov objects to in Boston Review.

In “The Third One,” a woman feels herself watched by an eye which becomes increasingly intimate and strange. Her companion, P., cannot understand her alarm. He keeps burning his fingers while lighting matches, a small comic erosion of the confidence with which he dismisses her. Gospodinov has given their disagreement a physical accompaniment before supplying the solution: she is pregnant, and the watcher is imagined as the child within her (pp. 58–61).

The final section is headed “A Happy Ending for Slow-Witted Readers.” Its question, “Have you figured it out yet?”, sorts us according to whether we have solved the device; the concluding announcement about a boy and a month delivers the answer (p. 61). P.’s obtuseness has a recognizable domestic life, but the narrator’s final intervention makes successful decoding the story’s principal reward. The heading interrupts our relation to the couple to assess our performance as readers.

A similar impatience appears at the end of “A Fly in the Urinal.” The contrast between a painted target for men’s aim and the moving flies of Balkan toilets has already developed its comic possibilities when the narrator announces that “the analogies turn into allegories” (p. 52). The story identifies its own enlargement for us. Where the airport dialogue persuades through the uses its speakers find for their fiction, this closing voice seems anxious to guarantee that we have noticed the significance. My sense of sketches comes partly from that hurry to declare a finished effect.

A Soul Still Learning to Say “It”

“The Christmas Soul of a Pig” scarcely needs to move its speaker at all. A newly released soul sits in a plum tree watching its body being prepared below. The first person immediately becomes troublesome: “I’m lying (not me, but my body—I must start getting used to it)” (p. 47). The premise has divided soul from flesh, while the sentence has not yet learned to keep them apart.

Ha, I almost jumped because a crow just landed on the plum tree, obviously attracted by the smell rising from below, from the cold blobs of clotted blood mixing with the snow. I thought she would peck at me, too, the way I’m all huddled up—a tiny piglet soul. I imagined it—a crow with a soul of a pig. In fact, I feel good having been given these few hours on earth. I can calmly watch, just a few pig’s tails away from my body, as the butcher slowly cuts me up, actually, cuts it up into pieces. God, I really do have impressive entrails. What a brisket, what a spleen, and those thin, looped intestines . . . I never knew I was such a beauty inside. I’m sure the one who is cutting me into pieces right now really likes it.

— Georgi Gospodinov, “The Christmas Soul of a Pig,” And Other Stories, translated by Alexis Levitin and Magdalena Levy (Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 48; italics in the original.

Immediately after the italic correction, the soul says, “I really do have impressive entrails”; soon the butcher is cutting “me” again. Gospodinov makes the speaker attempt a vocabulary appropriate to its new condition, then keeps that vocabulary answerable to its former existence. Even distance is measured in pig’s tails. The soul has ascended only a little way above the habits through which the pig knows a world.

Its admiration is especially unsettling because it adopts the butcher’s assessment of the body. A brisket can be beautiful to the creature that possessed it and to the person dismantling it; the same approval brings those positions together without making them morally compatible. The exclamation over the entrails is funny, but the pleasure belongs to a voice that still uses the word “me” for what the knife is cutting. Each grammatical relapse restores the cost that the airy premise might otherwise have removed.

Gospodinov keeps complicating the soul’s authority. It wonders whether admiration of bodily things is suitable for a soul, excuses its ignorance by its recent arrival in the condition, and feels sorry for humans who may suffer similar treatment in hell. Later it dismisses the story of the Fall as unrealistic because eating rotten apples never had such consequences for a pig (pp. 48–49). Its judgment of a story is grounded in its own digestive experience. Human theology has been taken over by a creature that cannot stop interpreting it as a pig, producing a speaker too inconsistent, curious and bodily attached to serve as a tidy moral emblem.

Staying on the Air

In “The Late Gift,” a homeless man sees himself on a television in a shop window on New Year’s Eve and believes he is being broadcast. A camera supplies the image; the imagined audience supplies his obligations (pp. 38–42).

Those obligations enter through his language. He begins to compose himself as a presenter, addresses viewers, talks about his former wife and interrupts himself with “Time for the ads” before taking a drink (p. 40). A private need has acquired the format of a commercial break. Gospodinov lets a familiar public manner organize the man’s smallest actions, until abandoning the screen would feel like abandoning people waiting for him to speak.

“I don’t know how long I’ll have to speak,” he says. “Whether there is anyone coming to replace me . . .” (p. 41). The uncertainty is painful because we understand the mechanism well enough to know that no replacement has been arranged. He has interpreted his own visibility as a job somebody needs him to perform. The cold, the effort of remaining there and his dwindling speech continue beyond our discovery of the error.

Calling Souluk by Name

The village’s last inhabitant in “A Living Soul” visits his dead friend Souluk, whose grave produces unusually sweet fruit. At night the old man counts the graves instead of sheep, remembering the faces as he goes. Gospodinov establishes a practice through which an empty village can still be inhabited in the man’s mind (pp. 62–63).

When he pours brandy on the grave, “The cracked dry soil drank it thirstily.” His next words give that thirst a name: “You’ve grown real thirsty, Souluk” (p. 63). The narrator animates the soil through an ordinary figure of speech; the mourner supplies the person who, for him, must be drinking. We can understand the dry earth absorbing liquid while hearing the continuity between these two accounts. Gospodinov needs no apparition to let a visit become an exchange.

The intimacy includes an old fear. Souluk and the visitor married sisters, and after Souluk died, his widow eventually came to live with the surviving man. The confession is addressed to someone whose jealousy has outlasted him:

“So listen to me now, and keep quiet.” The old man took a sip of his brandy and then said: “The seventh year after you passed away I took your wife in and we lived together for eleven years. Now, don’t get mad. Seven years had passed, she was alone, and I was alone, too. We were not like husband and wife, I never laid a finger on her. Hey, Souluk, do you hear me?” Souluk was silent, as if he had grown deaf. Only the flame in the lamp flickered more vigorously. “I didn’t tell you about this before because I know how touchy you are. But your wife was a good person. We spent eleven years together—she died last summer. When she gave up her soul, she kept saying your name. ‘How,’ she said, ‘will I tell him about it now?’ You’ve really scared that woman, you know. Listen, don’t hold a grudge against her in the hereafter. You can take it out on me if you want when I get there, I can bear it, but she’s a saint, believe me.”

— Georgi Gospodinov, “A Living Soul,” And Other Stories, translated by Alexis Levitin and Magdalena Levy (Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 65.

“Keep quiet” and “do you hear me?” belong to an argument with an interlocutor who might interrupt or refuse to listen. The old man supplies both possibilities. Even the narrator’s “as if he had grown deaf” briefly gives Souluk a reason for his silence more particular than being dead. Inside that imagined exchange, the survivor can defend the woman and offer to bear the punishment himself. The companionship which makes his solitude endurable also preserves his friend’s power to frighten. Death and the Gardener creates another dead interlocutor through remembered correction: a son imagines the father he misses disputing a village name as he writes.

The grave lamp falls while the old man sleeps, setting the dry cemetery alight. As the flames spread, he begins reciting the names of the dead as he does at bedtime. The same sequence that helped him sleep now belongs to an emergency: perhaps he is warning them, perhaps calling them to help. Gospodinov changes the purpose of an established verbal habit, so that its earlier tenderness becomes helpless action (pp. 65–66).

By the end, the old man blames Souluk for burning everything. The fallen lamp remains the cause of the fire; remembered jealousy gives the accident the character of a friend’s revenge. After the pears, the brandy and the confession, the old man is still speaking to Souluk. Even his accusation keeps him company.

Sources

Georgi Gospodinov, And Other Stories. Translated by Alexis Levitin and Magdalena Levy. Northwestern University Press, 2007. Publisher’s edition and contents.

Dimiter Kenarov, “Out of Exile: Notes on Georgi Gospodinov and Bulgarian Literature,” Boston Review, January 1, 2008.

The Complete Review, “And Other Stories — Georgi Gospodinov.”