Natural Novel: A Marriage in Borrowed Sentences

Part of: The Deep Reader

Author Hub: Georgi Gospodinov

Spoiler notice: This essay discusses the divorce, the gardener's notebook, and late episodes in Natural Novel.

The photographer in Natural Novel speaks entirely in the wrong genre. On the way home from the final divorce hearing, Emma asks for one last photograph with her husband. In the studio, the photographer greets them as a family, arranges their arms and faces, and wishes them a happy future with plenty of children. She is pregnant by another man. In Zornitsa Hristova's 2005 Dalkey Archive translation, his opening is wonderfully untroubled: “A family photo, eh?” (p. 23). Georgi Gospodinov lets a few professional instructions put the couple back into the gestures of marriage.

Just before this encounter, the narrator struggles to describe the pregnancy. He reaches for the word “author,” then sorts out the difference between being the woman's husband and being the child's father (p. 23). The photographer needs none of these distinctions. Emma's intended souvenir of an ending takes the conventional shape of a beginning. The joke hurts because it asks so little of them: an arm raised, a face turned, familiar gestures performed for the last picture together.

This small collision between available language and an unmanageable life runs through the novel's inventions. Its divorcing writer collects beginnings, natural histories, other people's conversations, and theories of fiction. He is quick, funny, and full of ideas. Often the language he borrows gives his embarrassment an unexpected form; sometimes he explains the arrangement so thoroughly that I begin to miss the life supposedly passing through it. I enjoyed Natural Novel without finding it particularly impressive as a whole. The marriage and the old gardener move me more deeply than the elaborate means of connecting all the book's pieces.

The Household Inside a Phrase

Gospodinov first gives the husband two ready-made responses to a pregnancy announcement. In one, the delighted prospective father celebrates; in the other, the reluctant man conceals his alarm behind the required happiness. The alternatives arrive with cinematic instructions, including the close-up. Each supplies a performance he can imagine making. Emma's actual news leaves him outside both scripts: she wants the baby and wants to keep him, though another man is the father. The expected declaration of feeling gives way to the time it takes him to light a cigarette (pp. 32–33).

The writing is especially acute about the interval between knowing something and finding a gesture adequate to it. In the scenes before he moves out, practical acts continue to imply a household. There are books to pack, cats to attend to, a bed they can still share. On their last evening together, he describes “My wife's child” as “a grammatically correct and still deeply mistaken phrase” (p. 88). The possessive keeps one attachment intact while the next noun makes him feel excluded from it. He hears the construction as a contradiction because he cannot yet imagine the relationship it could name.

His account turns even the unborn child's movement into hostility toward him. The disproportion belongs to his hurt: a kick becomes an argument against his presence. Gospodinov then lets Emma embrace him while he pretends to be asleep. She need not answer the theory he has made of her belly. Her arm and his feigned sleep let tenderness pass without requiring him to answer it. The next morning's departure remains in place. These are heartbreaking divorce scenes partly because ordinary intimacy survives inside them and has nowhere settled to go.

Everyone Has Something to Add

The toilet conversations achieve a much noisier intimacy. Gospodinov gives us stretches of dialogue without stable speaker names, so the company forms through interruption. Someone develops a thesis; someone else wants to finish eating. A projected grand history acquires the appropriate publishing format: a paperback on toilet paper. Scholarship keeps being dragged back toward the object it is trying to dignify. The voices are companionable because they can spoil one another's effects.

I was already thinking of Tarantino before the conversation named Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs (p. 22). The resemblance I felt was in the disproportionate seriousness of men elaborating a subject while another person keeps making the elaboration difficult. A remark can become a theory before the listener has finished his food. The references are well placed because they grow out of a rhythm the dialogue has already established.

The strangest poetry arrives when the speakers start giving language a body. It needs to unbutton its trousers, discharge the day's accumulated rubbish, and write an obscenity on the wall. The metaphor acquires urges and movements as the sentence develops. Then a man says the food is getting cold and wonders what he will tell his wife: “we talked shit” (p. 27). The scholarly discussion has furnished the literal subject of his idiom. His impatience also supplies its verdict. Another speaker promptly congratulates him on the revelation, making even the attempt to leave usable material for the evening.

Only afterward do we learn that these friends have been helping the man move, and that everyone has avoided mentioning the divorce. Gospodinov places the shared evasion beneath a conversation we have already enjoyed. Its extravagance now has a practical kindness: the friends give him an evening in which he can talk about something else. The following explanation of how an avoided topic sustains conversation is exact, though by then the scene has done much of that work (p. 28). When the narrator returns to its usefulness later, supported by further intellectual commentary, the account begins to feel overprovided for (p. 43).

That is my recurring difficulty with this clever, brisk novel. I enjoy the unusual movement of a thought and then find myself being told how to appreciate its movement. The toilet talk remains funny because its arguments keep encountering other people's appetites. An explanation of why the talk works has fewer opportunities to be interrupted.

Reading a Beekeeping Manual Against an Insult

The narrator's private reading is more elucidating since he can interpret every sentence for himself. After overhearing Emma call him a drone, he consults his beekeeping guides. The insult repeats something her father said years earlier; it arrives already borrowed. He proposes to free himself by stuffing the phrase with information until it swells like a tick and lets go (p. 112). Even this image imagines an eventual release from something feeding on him.

Gospodinov separates the manuals from the husband's comments typographically. Italic passages describe the insect, and ordinary type records the advantages he discovers for his own case:

The drone has a large body—15 to 17 mm long. It has well-built chest muscles and wings which allow it to fly at a great speed and distance. In the lower part of its back there are sophisticated and well-developed reproductive organs. So far Emma had said nothing bad about me. The purpose of drones is to fertilize the bees in their wedding flights. If they come across other hives, the bees are glad to accept them. Not bad, not bad at all. . . . but in the second half of summer, when the main melliferous flowers have withered and the incoming nectar is sparse, the swarming instinct disappears and drones become superfluous. The bees isolate them from the honey and, starving them, expel them through the entrance of the hive.

— Georgi Gospodinov, Natural Novel, translated by Zornitsa Hristova (Dalkey Archive Press, first edition, 2005), p. 112. Italics in the original.

The alternation gives his relief a comic rhythm. He reads strength, sexual competence, a welcome in other hives; each installment seems to improve his position. His approving comments grow shorter as his confidence rises. The final italic paragraph then runs uninterrupted through scarcity, uselessness, hunger, and expulsion. A description he has been treating as praise completes itself with his removal. The sentence extends all the way to the hive's entrance before giving him another chance to speak.

On the next page, that entrance becomes an exit. He searches for a divine message in bee families and finds a newspaper account that seems to confirm his fear of men's exclusion. The chapter ends by repeating Emma's sentence (p. 113). Information has multiplied the routes by which he can return to it. We have watched a reader choose each reassuring resemblance and then discover an unbearable continuation in the very source he chose. His bee family explains his marriage because he keeps asking it to; its apparent authority grows from the wounded reading Gospodinov has allowed us to follow.

This is an instance in which the novel's explanatory appetite becomes fully dramatic. The husband is doing something with a text, revising his estimate of himself as he reads, and paying for the confidence of the previous paragraph. The joke and the injury require the same sequence. Removing his running commentary would destroy the timing; removing the manual would leave only a man repeating his complaint.

The Freedom to Start Again

Borrowed literary openings offer a more ambitious escape. The narrator imagines a novel that continually begins, splicing together passages whose original books would otherwise determine their futures. Holden Caulfield's dismissal of the David Copperfield sort of autobiography runs into David Copperfield itself. Gospodinov makes one book's refusal introduce the very convention it refuses. The pleasure lies in the join: an inherited sentence finds itself doing work its original speaker would dislike (pp. 11–16).

The novel's unstable identities can make fragmentation an opportunity to change. The husband's ingenuity puts a difficult limit on that freedom. He can give a literary character a different next sentence, yet the beekeeping guides bring him back to the same insult. A fresh arrangement of information may renew the experience he wanted it to end.

There are ingenious story ideas almost everywhere: an old printing press that starts producing news of crimes still to happen, a novel assembled from other novels' openings, a man searching for a place to enter a text. The references often become active ingredients. But the explanation of the borrowed beginnings proceeds to describe their connections after we have felt the shock of the splice. Later, the fly's compound eye is offered as a model for fragmented narration, and the account keeps returning to its own instructions. “I will say it again,” the narrator announces before another formulation (p. 81). By this stage, I find the flies a less funny, more repetitive continuation of the toilet material.

F., the fly who eventually talks back, gives that judgment useful resistance. She wants to chat; the narrator's insistence on recording her discovery precisely unsettles her, and she questions his plan to publish their supposedly pointless conversations (pp. 124–128). The smallest participant can recognize his tendency to make ordinary company serve a literary project. Even when she begins to like his proposed film, she insists on the forgotten flies his grand account of the sixties leaves out. My impatience concerns the repeated explanation of the fly as a formal model; F.'s objections give the insect another life in the book.

The editor promises a more substantial independence and remains, for me, too thinly involved. He receives the notebook, publishes material without the writer's consent, encounters the wife's objection, and finally signs a publishing contract after the writer has disappeared. The shared name, Georgi Gospodinov, makes that signature possible and morally uncomfortable (pp. 6–10). The frame explains how the manuscript reached print, but the editor's own divorce remains a passing disclosure where I wanted a sustained counterpoint.

The uncertain boundaries between voices are part of the construction. I can see their cleverness and still feel too often that I am reading different versions of one private journal. Recognizing a deliberate device does not settle how much life it generates. The later Gospodinov novels retain that wealth of references and the occasional urge to explain their own construction; in Time Shelter, the instability eventually enters the telling itself. Here, the figure who most changes my experience of the method is the gardener.

The Gardener's Last Telegram

His arrival first reaches us through a village's habits of description. The rocking chair, cat, and books help mark him as peculiar before we learn much about his thought. The postal clerk is “professionally obliged” to read his telegrams in order to count their characters; curiosity also leads her to copy a letter's foreign address and send it to her daughter to decipher (p. 90). He is the recognized eccentric, while the village eagerly awaits news of his recipient. Gospodinov's calm report makes the distribution of normality increasingly grotesque.

The gardener tries to send the telegram “I'm dead.” The clerk objects that such wording is forbidden, so he tears up the form and writes “I'm off” (p. 91). The revised wording makes the message administratively acceptable. Two women subsequently arrive, arrange his burial, and leave with his notebook. The account of his life is nearly over before his own writing begins.

Inside that notebook, precision becomes something he must actively restrain:

The worst is I cannot describe them in accurate detail. I have the words at hand but I can't do it. I mustn't. I suspect that a detailed and accurate description of what's coming will set its mechanism in motion. A detailed and accurate description will be the detonator; it will supply the formula for how things will develop. This makes my task incredibly hard. I must use another language. I'm trying gardening. Say it with plants, use their silent language that speaks with nothing but forms. I expect serious admonitions on their part. In my letters to the Organization I try to talk in allegories. I'm trying not to give too accurate a description of what's coming in order to avoid bringing together the words that might open the floodgates. But they obviously don't take my letters seriously. They don't comprehend the allegory.

— Georgi Gospodinov, Natural Novel, translated by Zornitsa Hristova (Dalkey Archive Press, first edition, 2005), p. 93.

“I mustn't” interrupts the initial claim of inability with a prohibition. He has the words and has to prevent himself from using them. The repeated “detailed and accurate” makes precision sound like a dangerous procedure, while the move to gardening supplies a quieter activity in which the same caution can be practiced. His predicament then survives every attempted solution: allegory protects the recipients from what a direct statement might unleash, and also prevents them from taking his warning seriously. The passage makes a whole pattern of conduct out of restrictions on speaking.

His reasoning is frightening, funny, and intimate at once. The notebook lets us inhabit its consistency without establishing that its predicted catastrophe is real. This is the most convincing counterpoint in the book because the problem of explanation determines how a particular man spends his days. He grows plants, sends letters, withholds descriptions, and prepares an escape. Years later, illness reduces another gardener’s notebook in Death and the Gardener to dates and abbreviations, making a dying man’s silence visible to his son. My sense of a good, uneven novel persists, but these chapters are the part I most want to return to.

By the end of the notebook, the gardener is looking for a place to slip into a novel. An opening would be dangerous: its syntax is too tense, its words too alert. A lyrical digression or a lengthy description might distract them enough to admit him (p. 101). Gospodinov turns a difference in narrative concentration into terrain a frightened man hopes to cross. The gardener reads as if the sentences could notice his presence. Entering their world will require leaving his body behind.

That body still needs burial, and the cat still needs care. His last preparations descend from the imagined passage into fiction to these remaining obligations. He worries about the animal and hopes they might meet again in another novel. The notebook ends with “Well, I'm off” (p. 101), returning us to the telegram we have already seen accepted.

Ten pages earlier, the village account had reported the cat's cries coming from the house and then falling silent (p. 91). The notebook reverses the order in which we would ordinarily learn of a departure and its consequences.

By the time he worries about leaving her, we have already heard her crying in the house.

Sources

Georgi Gospodinov, Natural Novel, translated by Zornitsa Hristova (Dalkey Archive Press, first edition, 2005), ISBN 1-56478-376-6. All parenthetical page references and quotations refer to this edition.

Mihaela P. Harper, “Breaking Up, Down and Out: Anomie in Georgi Gospodinov's Natural Novel”, The Slavonic and East European Review 93, no. 3 (July 2015), pp. 429–450. Author's accessible copy.