Georgi Gospodinov's novel "The Physics of Sadness" begins with a heartbreaking scene. The year is 1925 and the narrator's grandfather, then a boy, is at the market. A wizard locks his mouth shut so he can only utter a weak moo. He is terrified. In the same market a boy with a bull's head is shown, one of all those deformities formerly displayed to paying audiences. The boy's owner forces him to drink from a bucket and greet the onlookers with a pained moo.
A vulnerable boy in a world full of cruel or just thoughtless adults. As the Minotaur, the narrator thinks and recounts the story of King Minos's wife Pasiphae who gave birth to a bull. The little Minotaur was locked in a labyrinth in Crete. In the myth he is a monster, in reality, that is, in Gospodinov's story, he is a victim, a child who, through no fault of his own, is hidden and imprisoned underground. As the narrator himself lived in a basement apartment in Sofia, Bulgaria, or as his grandfather was forced to hide after the Second World War when the security police were looking for deserters.
Cellars and labyrinths with hidden memories and secret archives abound in this novel, which itself deviates here and there and follows traces and whims along labyrinthine paths. The narrator, who is similar to the author, recounts childhood memories, family anecdotes, the fruits of reading and not least memories from the socialist era. It's often comical and wistful at the same time, as when he compares the time capsules dug up by schoolchildren in Bulgaria in the 1970s with those dug up before the World's Fair in New York in 1938. The Bulgarian children imagined that Communism had triumphed on Earth and was now being exported by astronauts to other planets. The American time capsule became obsolete as early as 1945 and was replaced with one containing blueprints for the atomic bomb.
There is something poignant about the attempts to preserve the present for the future, but also preoccupied, or just worthy of the "pathological empathy" the narrator says he suffers from. And the question is whether that compassion is not an occupational disease that writers suffer from, similar to the historical melancholy that strikes the narrator when he looks at the great cathedrals of small Norman villages that were once important cities.
Any attempt to return to a better past is doomed to failure
Does all this sound confusing? It is rather associative in a kind of forward movement that leads backwards, down into the vault of history: one story begets another and most of them reveal that history is almost always a dangerous place, full of death and destruction. And all attempts to return to a better past are doomed to failure: the world you dream of returning to never existed
In the just ended Swedish election campaign there was a party that wanted to make Sweden Sweden again, but which Sweden? And for whom? And is Sweden no longer Sweden? Gospodinov would probably have drawn a parallel to "ostalgin", that longing back to "the old Eastern Europe" that only wants back parts of what once existed, but not the exit bans, not the surveillance. In addition, you want to keep your smartphone and other things that weren't there before.
In Gospodinov's much-noticed novel "Time flight" (in Swedish 2024), a certain Gaustin furnishes a clinic for dementia where every detail recreates a past where the patients' memories can be brought to life, but not all details have a good effect, it is important to make the right selection, call it falsification of history. Gaustin also appears in "The Physics of Sadness". As a lightly masked version of the author himself, he can invent all sorts of digressions and create his own rules for how a novel should be - and "it's no Aryan".
Gaustin is thus full of fantastic projects with the goal of finding and archiving stories and memories that, unlike the security police's archives, contain lives and experiences worth reconnecting with. While the narrator broods over a divorce and rejoices in his little daughter, Gaustin suggests that they create a cinema for the poor where they retell films for cheap. Or blurting out personal poems to passers-by, planting classic novels in soil to see if they bear fruit, and so on in a flurry of more or less crazy plans. I don't know Bulgarian, but Hanna Sandborgh's Swedish follows easily in all transformations and moods.
Not only literature has something to offer when it comes to saving precious memories. Nature itself stores experience and time, sun in a bottle of cognac, memories of bodies in a hotel mattress, fire-yellow lichens on a rock face. Don't think it's for fun, there is great seriousness here, a belief that it is possible to spend time with the past and bring good memories to life. But then you also have to guard the border against those who falsify history and exploit it for their own shady purposes.
