'Compulsively readable' New York Times
'Utterly original' Alberto Manguel
In the small and the insignificant - that's where life hides, that's where it builds its nest.
Our unnamed narrator is not well. He suffers from attacks of 'pathological empathy', which cause him to wander unbidden into other people's memories. He moves from recollection to recollection - from a Bulgarian country fair in 1925, where he meets a Minotaur, to inside the mind of a slug, as it is swallowed by his own Grandfather.
Part family history, part coming-of-age story, part meditation on life in Communist Europe, The Physics of Sorrow is a dazzlingly inventive, mind-expanding novel from one of Europe's most important writers.
TRANSLATED FROM THE BULGARIAN BY ANGELA RODEL
"For all Gospodinov’s obsession with sorrow, he is a trickster at heart, and often very funny."
― Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker
"There is something of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man here, furiously attempting to write the world before it’s all swept away... the result is a powerful toast to living."
― Matthew Janney, Financial Times
"In this swirling, ruminative novel, translated by Rodel, award-winning Bulgarian poet, playwright, and novelist Gospodinov takes the mythological minotaur as the central figure in a metafictional narrative that leaps through time and space, from King Minos’ palace to communist Bulgaria, from politics to quantum physics . . . A playful, profound meditation on storytelling and time."
― Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"There are very few novels that appear to a seasoned reader as utterly original: The Physics of Sorrow is one of these rare books."
― Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading
