The Physics of Sorrow: The Lives a Story Can Hold

Part of: The Deep Reader

Author Hub: Georgi Gospodinov

Spoiler notice: This review discusses the stories and ending of The Physics of Sorrow.

A murder in The Physics of Sorrow gets held up over a pair of slippers. A husband has caught his wife with another man, brought a friend along as witness, and now stands in the bedroom with a gun. Georgi Gospodinov gives him the posture of a man imitating something he has seen at the movies. The lover cannot quite work out which intruder is the husband; the friend cannot find anywhere decent to look. Looking at the naked woman would be improper, looking down would make him seem guilty, and looking at the husband would deepen the humiliation. Nobody can occupy the familiar scene comfortably, although everyone seems to know what sort of scene it is.

Then the husband has to decide whom to shoot. The lover is trespassing; the wife invited him; killing her would be melodramatic and, besides, she is still his wife. Each argument creates another difficulty. With the gun still raised, the narration wanders into the ordeal of buying slippers.

“The Story Buyer,” the sixth section of Gospodinov's novel, was my favorite part of the book. Its narrator acquires other people's stories after losing a stranger gift: the ability to experience their lives from inside. The story of the adulterous wife gives him several minds at once, each embarrassed or frightened in its own way, while the words keep the gun suspended long enough for us to feel how slowly a second can pass.

The Husband Who Cannot Choose

Gospodinov begins the episode with the speed of a joke: two men make a bet, arrange a test, and catch one wife with a lover. Once they open the bedroom door, a few seconds take most of the telling. Description moves among the four people, spending a little time with each before settling inside the husband. His thoughts borrow the language of property, religion and melodrama, trying out an authority that might relieve him of choosing. Even his outrage wants instructions.

Angela Rodel's English lets that performance grow increasingly elaborate. The movement from the house to the bedroom to the woman repeats the same possessive reasoning, each supposed violation authorizing a worse punishment. A competing argument promptly makes the wife the guilty party, until the husband hears how theatrical he sounds. His thoughts can stage the crime, prosecute it and ridicule the production without producing a decision. Gospodinov then gives this paralysis its domestic history:

Decision-making has never been his strong suit. Ever. If he has to pick out a pair of slippers from the store, his whole afternoon is shot. Black or brown? After he has mentally counted all his pants and divided them into two piles—those that go with brown and those that go with black—then he glances at the furniture in the room, because it would be good for the slippers to match it as well. After all of that, an hour has already gone by and he’s decided on the brown ones. But, horror of horrors, there are two types of brown slippers—with braid and without. On top of everything, there is darker and lighter braid. That’s how bad it is with slippers, but here we’re talking about murder and doling out justice. Who is guiltier in a case of fornication?

— Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow, translated by Angela Rodel (Open Letter, first edition, 2015), p. 196.

The alternatives breed inside the paragraph. Black or brown becomes clothes, furniture, braid, then the color of the braid; each practical consideration delays the purchase while seeming necessary to it. We spend the sentences making the man's negligible decisions, and the account of a wasted afternoon occupies the seconds in which he might kill someone. “His whole afternoon is shot” acquires a particularly ugly aptness with a gun waiting outside the digression. The joke has the shape of the mind that makes the situation dangerous.

His next idea is to shoot the wedding photograph. He imagines the glass falling over the lovers and admires the symbolism, then gets stuck deciding which face to aim at. Even the gesture that would spare both lives demands another rehearsal. The narration allows him enough rope to become absurd without making him harmless. After all those possible acts and their qualifications, he turns and kills his friend. A short maxim follows on page 197: “No external witness, no crime.” The wife and lover remain, so this is a grotesque solution to his humiliation, a killer's convenient arithmetic. The man has removed the friend before whom he would have to keep explaining himself. His rehearsed decisions occupy several pages; the killing takes a sentence, followed by the untroubled brevity he could never achieve while everyone was still alive.

Flour on Two Faces

Early in the novel, access to another person happens with barely any interruption at all. The narrator follows his grandfather as a child at a village fair, slipping into the boy's age and sensations while the older man's account continues around him. Those family pages briefly made me think of Macondo: the fairground marvels, the local voices, the ease with which ancestral life becomes available to a descendant. Gospodinov locates the passage between generations in something as small as an opening eye.

In “The Bread of Sorrow,” the three-year-old grandfather wakes at a mill. The boy opens his eyes; a moment later the narrator opens his. The same movement has crossed from third person to first person, and the world is still there: the rumbling mill, the itching dust, the carts and sacks. There is no pause to explain the transfer before we have begun to inhabit its consequences. When the child discovers that his mother and sisters have gone, fear fills him like water forced into a little pitcher, leaving too little air even to cry.

His calls for his mother lengthen. The question mark disappears as the vowels stretch; the sound begins to resemble the Minotaur's lowing, a connection the novel pursues through the abandoned children of myth and family history. Sound reaches a condition the child cannot yet name. The narrator follows it into the mouth:

The question has disappeared. Hopelessness and rage, a crumb of rage. What else is inside? Bewilderment. How could this be? Mothers don’t abandon their children. It’s not fair. This just doesn’t happen. “Abandon” is a word he doesn’t yet know. I don’t yet know. The absence of the word does not negate the fear, on the contrary, it heaps up ever higher, making it even more intolerable, crushing. The tears begin, now it’s their turn, the only consolers. At least he can cry, the fear has uncorked them, the pitcher of fear has run over. The tears stream down his face, down my face, they mix with the flour dust on the face, water, salt, and flour, and knead the first bread of grief. The bread that never runs out. The bread of sorrow, which will feed us through all the coming years. Its salty taste on the lips. My grandfather swallows. I swallow, too. We are three years old.

— Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow, translated by Angela Rodel (Open Letter, first edition, 2015), p. 21.

The flour was in the air before it became an image of grief. Tears supply the water and salt; the face becomes the place where the ingredients meet. The phrase “the face” briefly dispenses with an owner after “his” and “my” have shared it. Two short sentences then give each person his own swallow, and the final sentence assigns them one age. The impossible has become an ordinary bodily action performed twice. Gospodinov's metaphor grows out of what the child has breathed, felt and tasted, carrying the grandfather's hurt into a mouth that belongs to another generation.

Explanation is already present here: the narrator names fear, bewilderment and consolation. Its force comes from continuing to work on the child's body. Even the explanatory pitcher keeps filling, preventing a cry before allowing the tears to overflow. The prose can think because sensation keeps giving it something to think through.

Outside the mill, hunger has its own terrible calculations. The mother has eight children, a husband at war, and flour that will run out before winter ends. When the eldest daughter, Dana, says they have forgotten the boy, Gospodinov repeats the silence on separate lines. The empty time becomes almost unbearable. We know that this child will have descendants; the narrator imagines those unborn people watching the mother's hesitation, with their existence dependent on her next words. The family stretches across a century and still has to wait beside a donkey cart.

The mother finally tells Dana she can go back if she wants. That conditional passes the decision to a thirteen-year-old. Dana runs toward the mill, and the narration moves into her running body, down to the road striking her feet and the bushes her fear mistakes for men. By the end of the run, the person she is seeking can be called her brother, the narrator's grandfather, and himself. Poverty has produced an abandonment, a silence and a dangerous journey. The later metaphysical reach remains tied to those particular costs.

Kisses, Funerals, Chernobyl

The novel can also make a whole decade pass in a handful of entries. In “An Official History of the 1980s,” adolescent kisses alternate with the deaths of Soviet leaders. A private advance keeps finding a public catastrophe beside it. The boy briefly voices the causal fantasy on page 103: “Am I killing them?” By the time fumbling sex in the park is followed by Chernobyl, the pattern has escalated far beyond a funeral.

The next entry is “A long half-life of exponential decay ensues.” In the 2015 Open Letter edition, the sequence ends on page 104. The scientific phrase continues the nuclear disaster while also lending an appalling duration to the sexual recollection. The final verb sounds like the orderly conclusion of a report. Desire has acquired a fallout period.

Gospodinov's humor stays sharp even where the novel becomes less satisfying to me. Here the list has the timing of a practiced comic: enough repetition to establish an expectation, then a catastrophe large enough to deform it. P. T. Smith's reading of the overlapping tones catches the peculiar doubleness of this passage. We can laugh at the outrageous conjunction while the scale of what has been placed beside a boy's sexual life remains intact.

The form that elsewhere makes the narrator feel like a collector can be intensely alive. Each entry here changes the one before it. There is very little language, and considerable movement between the lines.

The Archivist Explains Himself

Collecting becomes urgent when the narrator's extraordinary empathy fades. The novel calls it a “pale substitute” on page 120, and Gospodinov has described the resulting disintegration of the early narrative: the loss of the gift allows accumulation, lists and purchased stories to determine more of the book's form. Its widening miscellany gives a shape to deprivation. The man who could pass into other bodies now tries to keep what he can in boxes and notebooks.

There is a painful difference between those two activities, and parts of the novel made me feel it rather too completely. The memory keeper can become an archivist naming what he has saved, then explaining the value of saving it. Inventories, speculative notes, mythological arguments and declarations about storytelling compete for room. The family lives that gave the undertaking its warmth grow intermittently distant. The experience recalled my reservations about the middle of Time Shelter, although that novel's enlargement into national choices of a past decade has a different design.

The most persuasive defense of this expansiveness is that recurrence keeps deepening what we first understood. Smith makes that case for the novel's apparent repetitions. There are places where it holds, particularly when a returning figure changes the narrator's position. Pregnancy gives the Minotaur one of its most unsettling transformations. A child moving inside the mother's belly might seem to be another creature wandering its enclosure; instead, the narrator casts the approaching child as Theseus and discovers himself in the monster who must die. Fatherhood threatens the person he has been.

Gospodinov even reverses the order of the identification on page 176: “The Minotaur was me” becomes “I was the Minotaur,” pushing the speaker into the front of the sentence. Around this genuine change, the explanation grows increasingly insistent. The umbilical cord receives its mythological counterpart, the roles are assigned, the answer to the question of the Minotaur's identity is announced, and the reversal explains its own purpose. The passage lets us watch a powerful imaginative association being made, then spends additional language ensuring that we have followed it. Across repeated defenses and reassignments of the monster, I sometimes wanted the image to develop at a greater distance from its interpreter.

The problem grows clearer in the later discussion of quantum physics. Gospodinov finds a wonderfully comic route from the observing eye to loneliness, from a universe dependent on observation to a man whom nobody visits or calls. A child can hear a boson becoming a bison. Abstract language remains vulnerable to ordinary misery and verbal mischief. These are among the pleasures that keep the speculation companionable.

Alongside them come direct formulations of the novel's method. Classical narrative closes possible paths; the narrator wants to leave room for alternatives, uncompleted stories and secrets. By this point we have spent an entire lethal hesitation among alternatives in the bedroom. The husband changed targets, tried on a grand symbolic gesture and wandered among shades of slipper braid. That passage allowed possibility to consume time. The later statements tell us why the author values a freedom his fiction has already made available.

This is where the narrator can start to sound like an essayist explaining the novel around him. His slippery identities prevent a simple equation with the biographical Gospodinov, but the reading experience can still become one of prolonged authorial consideration. The book wants to be many things, and its ideas do not always gain from having their implications spelled out. Recognizing that the looseness is designed leaves this judgment of its proportions open.

As for physics and metaphysics, the title enjoys the confusion. The novel itself protests the division, imagines impossible experiments, and lets jokes interfere with solemn inquiry. Its speculative science belongs to that imaginative play. The passages that persuade me most have an unusually material precision: flour becomes wet, a mouth swallows, a hand delays pulling a trigger. Gospodinov can send these things a long way toward metaphysics because he has first made their physical occurrence so exact.

When the Mother Comes Back

The final pages restore much of the force that the explanatory stretches dispersed. They also retain a threat. A literary expert, appointed to examine the vanished narrator's notebooks, begins reading in the basement and eventually stops going out. The pursuit of another person's stories can absorb the reader as thoroughly as it absorbed the collector. That confinement stands close to the novel's great release of possible lives.

In “What Is Left at the End,” a childhood image starts moving. On page 278, Gospodinov connects its movement to a sequence of recoveries with “At that moment,” then lets one present-tense action follow another. The Minotaur finds his mother, a woman receives a letter, a man steps out of a poster, and separated figures begin to meet. Commas and paragraph breaks allow distinct histories to continue within the same moment. Their distance survives in the page's spaces while the verbs bring them into a common present.

One of those returns changes an earlier rescue. At the mill, it was Dana who ran back for her brother. Near the end, the three-year-old grandfather sees his mother running toward him. The difference is small enough to pass as a repeated image, and it contains the child's remaining wish. His sister's love brought him home; his mother's hesitation remained part of what had happened. The final vision gives him the sight he had needed when he called for her.

The scale of sorrow has been larger than one person since the prologue, where the speaking “I” already includes different generations and nonhuman lives. The ending gives that multiplicity a different emotional duration. All those scattered possibilities receive a moment in which they can happen together. The invitation can feel extravagant after so much collecting, but its generosity is created in the sequence of actions: people turn, receive, recognize, walk toward one another.

Gospodinov's uneven novel moved me most when it could make a borrowed life occupy the time of reading. The husband's slippers prolong a second; a child's tears pass between two faces; the final vision lets a century of separations share a present. At the mill, the original scene remains painful and specific. We have heard the silence on the cart and watched a girl run alone through the dusk. Now the woman who stayed on the cart is running too.

Sources

Georgi Gospodinov, The Physics of Sorrow. Translated by Angela Rodel. Open Letter, first edition, 2015. ISBN 978-1-940953-10-6. Quotations and page references follow this edition.

P. T. Smith, “The Physics of Sorrow — Georgi Gospodinov,” Full Stop, April 17, 2015.

Steven Wingate, “The Animal That Is the Novel: An Interview with Georgi Gospodinov,” Fiction Writers Review, September 21, 2015. Interview translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel.