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The Physics of Sorrow
Reader Score
81%
81% of readers
recommend this book
Published a decade before his International Booker Prize-winning Time Shelter, Georgi Gospodinov's The Physics of Sorrow has become an underground cult classic. Finding strange solace in the myth of the Minotaur, a man named Georgi reconstructs the story of his life like a labyrinth, meandering through the past to find the melancholy child at the center of it all. With profound wit and empathy, he catalogues curious instances of abandonment, spanning from antiquity to the Anthropocene; recounts scenes of a turbulent boyhood in 1970s Bulgaria, spent mostly in a basement; and charts a bizarre run-in with an eccentric flaneur named Gaustine. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, and exhibiting his signature audacious style, this expansive work affirms Gospodinov as "one of Europe's most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists" (Dave Eggers).
Book Details
- Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
- Publish Date: May 7th, 2024
- Pages: 288
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.40in - 0.90in - 0.74lb
- EAN: 9781324094890
- Categories: • Literary• Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology• Science Fiction - General
About the Author
Gospodinov, Georgi: - Georgi Gospodinov is one of Bulgaria's most prolific authors. He is the recipient of the International Booker Prize, the Premio Strega, and the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, among many other accolades. He lives in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Rodel, Angela: - Angela Rodel won the International Booker for translation and has received honors such as the PEN Translation Fund Grant and an NEA Literature Translation Fellowship. She lives in Sofia.
Praise for this book
For all Gospodinov's obsession with sorrow, he is a trickster at heart, and often very funny.--Garth Greenwell "The New Yorker"
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
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
Brilliant . . . Elegantly translated by Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow is a fragmented novel that coheres into a remarkable, thought-provoking whole. It is a winding labyrinth through Bulgarian communism, art, literature, history, the personal past, love, sorrow, and so much more.--Martha Anne Toll "NPR"
The Physics of Sorrow is a novel to get lost in and a desperate struggle to look everywhere -- in history, politics, science, myth, literature, and Tamagotchi (really) -- to make one's place in it all make sense.-- "Polygon"