A Review of The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov

Elizabeth Bales Frank
Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
(Rochester, NY: Open Letter, 2015)

The unnamed narrator of Georgi Gospodinov’s inventive, ambitious novel The Physics of Sorrow suffers from “pathological empathy or obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome,” most acutely in his childhood. “Over the years the attacks became easier to control and lost their most acute manifestations, without disappearing entirely. Just as in empathy . . . we never know where the person wanders when he is in such a fit.”

"I felt an urgent need to horde, to organize things into boxes and notebooks, into lists and enumerations. To preserve things with words. The empty space left behind by one obsession can always be taken up by another. Before, I could inhabit all the bodies in the world, now I’m happy if I manage to move from room to room within the house of my own body."

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