In 2023 Gospodinov won the International Booker Prize for Time Shelter, together with his translator Angela Rodel. The novel explores the temptations and dangers of returning to the past. Here, the enigmatic Gaustine, a “vagrant in time,” and Gospodinov’s muse, opens a series of memory clinics across Europe in order to bring some comfort to elderly patients suffering from Alzheimer’s. At first, these clinics consist of small rooms dedicated to particular decades, but the project quickly proves so popular that healthy people want to take part. Soon whole towns are constructed, dedicated to specific years, and later entire countries hold referendums to decide which past era they would like to recreate and inhabit. Travel between countries is no longer simply a geographical, but also a temporal shift. As Time Shelter’s anonymous narrator describes, “the old roadmaps became timemaps.”
Alongside this growing obsession with the past comes an interest in historical reenactments, which culminates in a restaging of the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip so accurate that “even the clouds are the same,” and which risks real-world consequences. So much so that our narrator fears that in 2024, “Europe finds itself on the cusp of a second First World War.”
Themes of memory and time are also explored in Gospodinov’s 2012 novel The Physics of Sorrow—also translated by Rodel. Here Gospodinov explores the nature of memory and time through a seemingly eponymous hero who can access the memories of others. The narrative centers around the myth of the Minotaur, and the novel’s delicate labyrinthine structure allows a flitting of consciousness between people, animals, and across time. The novel is a rich tapestry of memories, suspended within the metaphor of ancient myth. Most recently, Gospodinov’s beautifully observed memoir The Story Smuggler teases at the themes in his novels. He writes about the nature of being Bulgarian, growing up in the Soviet Union, and most importantly, the act of story-writing. Gospodinov describes the inspiration behind his vocation, and his belief that “ . . . stories (which is to say literature) serve principally to provide solace.” The tone of his immediate, comforting prose is replicated in the interview that follows.
I was very honored to interview Gospodinov, whose answers were generously translated by Angela Rodel. We discussed the nature of memory, time capsules, the power and dangers of the past, the act of smuggling stories abroad, the intertextual nature of his novels, and of course the Minotaur, Bulgarian literature, and the significance and role of his omnipresent muse, Gaustine.
—Sarah Gear, Assistant Interview Editor
Very few novels have been translated from Bulgarian into English thus far. Can you tell us how The Physics of Sorrow and Time Shelter came to be commissioned?
My first translation into English was of my debut Natural Novel (published in 1999 in Bulgarian). This happened exactly twenty years ago. An editor from Dalkey Archive with Serbian roots had read the Serbian translation of the novel, liked it, and contacted me. The novel came out in the United States in 2004. Natural Novel was published in French in the meantime, and then in over twenty other languages. It was the first Bulgarian novel to break into the international literary scene after 1989. And I believe it was the first to start clearing a path for Bulgarian literature abroad. After that, it was a little easier for The Physics of Sorrow. It came out in English with Open Letter Press; the publisher, Chad Post, had known my previous novel from his work at Dalkey. I am grateful to these two publishers for their curiosity about my first books.
The Physics of Sorrow also marked my fortuitous meeting with translator Angela Rodel. We had known each other before, but this was her first translation of a major text of mine. It was shortlisted for the US PEN Translation Prize, won the 2016 AATSEEL Prize for Best Literary Translation, and was featured in a very nice profile in The New Yorker by Garth Greenwell. In Europe, the novel was nominated for the Premio Strega Europeo and a number of other international awards. I was very happy about the success of this novel because I put a lot of myself into it; the exploration of sadness from antiquity to the Anthropocene and the inversion of myths such as that of the Minotaur are personally important to me.
The English translation of Time Shelter was released quite soon after its Bulgarian edition—it came out in Bulgaria in 2020, and in English in parallel in the UK and US in 2022, from W&N and Liveright, respectively. Despite the great reviews for the previous novels, finding a publisher was once again not easy. There was still a certain skepticism or lack of courage when it came to publishing a contemporary author in translation, let alone a Bulgarian author. I still keep the rejection letters from several publishers as a souvenir. Then the novel won the International Booker Prize in 2023—and in doing so it paved the way for other Bulgarian authors, including some who have not been published in English in the last century. Time Shelter is also my first book to be published in the UK. That’s the story of these translations in a nutshell.
Your 2012 novel The Physics of Sorrow has only recently been published in the UK. Can you tell us about it?
The Physics of Sorrow is a journey from Antiquity to the present day, exploring the myth of the Minotaur and the theme of abandonment. Empathy is at the heart of this novel, it is the thread, the boy suffering from over-empathy who enters into the stories of people from different times during the twentieth century.
The Physics of Sorrow is also one of my most personal novels. It’s an exploration of the sadness that spreads through the world along with the first sense that something is off about the future, that anxiety has begun to fill the air. It also thematizes the anthropocene and what happens to all living beings, not just humans. The protagonist suffers from acute empathy, and through his pain and talent we enter into the stories of not only humans, but the mythical figure of the Minotaur, and the living world around us. I’ve tried to place the question of suffering and compassion in a broader perspective.
The Physics of Sorrow is also a history of the twentieth century through the personal stories of a son, father, and grandfather. This book is also where Gaustine made his first (still innocent) experiments. But the book is far from merely sad, there’s also a healthy dose of irony and downright funny moments and unexpected twists.
The image of the Minotaur is so beautifully and inventively woven throughout The Physics of Sorrow. It recurs in images, sounds, even seemingly tiny details. Why did you choose to focus on the myth of the Minotaur? What does the Minotaur mean to you?
The myth of the Minotaur is the myth of the Other, the one who is different from us. Moreover, it is a myth (at least in the novel’s interpretation) about how we have turned the Other into a monster because of our own sins. The Minotaur, in fact, seen through the empathic gaze of the attentive reader, is an abandoned two- or three-year-old child locked in Minos’s basement. This demonizing of the Other is becoming increasingly important today and is at the root of all these conflicts we are now witnessing.
The snippets of narrative in The Physics of Sorrow put me in mind of the rooms that are assembled in Time Shelter. Had you already conceived of writing Time Shelter when you were writing The Physics of Sorrow?
The Physics of Sorrow introduces some major themes that later appear in Time Shelter. The two novels interconnect, unfold and converse with each other. In fact, I first coined the phrase “time shelter” precisely in The Physics of Sorrow. In this sense, Time Shelter continues the theme of memory and stories. However, it is also a very different novel. The stakes are different because the time in which it was written has also changed. The central question for Time Shelter is how the influx of the past and new nostalgias can be “discrete monsters.” What happens when the dealers of the past, the populists, come to exploit and instrumentalize our nostalgias? And yet another question—how does one live with a severe deficit of any future?
You write about time capsules in The Physics of Sorrow. Is this also your inspiration for Time Shelter?
Yes, I am very interested in time capsules. What do we choose to preserve from the world we live in? Actually, every book is a time capsule, a sort of Noah’s Ark. I write to preserve and pass on a few important things. I write to save a few personal stories from the flood of oblivion. This is what The Physics of Sorrow contains. This same idea also inspires some of what is written in Time Shelter. There, however, what has been preserved in time capsules is already coming back into play, reemerging. It’s as if we’ve reached the future, and from what we’ve gathered from the time capsules we want to reconstruct the world we left behind, the world of yesterday. Is this possible, and to what extent is this ethical, Time Shelter asks.
You reference Facebook in The Physics of Sorrow, and I wanted to ask if this might function as a kind of time capsule now? How does social media affect our ability to remember? And might it augment the draw of the past?
I think social media platforms pretend to be time capsules of sorts, supposedly resembling them, but deep down they are not. What’s more, we could call them time capsules of oblivion. The glut of information that literally leaks out from beneath our fingers only pollutes and silences memory. Memory is not made by scrolling. Or if it is, it is some kind of short-term, scrolling memory.
In previous interviews, you have spoken about the “weaponization of nostalgia” that is taking place across the world. You have also written that “[you] write because you are afraid.” I would like to ask if this “weaponization” is a fear you are writing against?
Our fears are a very important foundation for writing and storytelling. Narrative is like a net that captures fear, pulls it out of the realm of the formless and nameless, and gives it form, cultivates it. Or to use another metaphor, narrative tames the wild beasts of our fears. In The Story Smuggler, the phrase you mention comes specifically after the story I tell about the first thing I ever wrote. When I was very young, six or seven, I had a nightmare that repeated itself every night. I couldn’t tell it to my grandmother, she stopped me because there is a belief that if you tell your nightmare, it comes true. So I wrote it down. And it never happened again—but I never forgot it either. That’s the price.
Also, the fear of the “weaponization” of nostalgia is now a fear of a different order, and that’s what the novel Time Shelter is about. It explores populist and political uses of nostalgia that we have seen in recent times. This novel speaks out against these possible abuses.
Is your writing a way to change the past, or to reassess it? What can we learn from the past?
One of the things we have to learn is how to keep the past in the past, how to visit its rooms, of course, but not to lock ourselves inside them. I think we are experiencing a quiet revolution in terms of time, our sense of time has shifted in recent years. The pandemic and the current wars have helped do that, of course—they themselves “reduce” the future, they are a glitch in time. Something else I was thinking about when writing the novel is where this virus of the past came from. Has fear of the future and present-day anxiety opened the door wider to the refuge of the past? But is this turning back a true refuge, and when does it become a trap? How can the past be used politically? How much past can one bear? It is in the field of such questions that the novel Time Shelter unfolds. And invites the reader into a conversation about them.
In your interview for the International Booker Prize in 2023, you state that “something had gone awry in the clockworks of time” and that progress, or perhaps time, was no longer necessarily about moving forward. How do Time Shelter and The Physics of Sorrow address these themes—and what can we learn about the past from these novels?
The Physics of Sorrow explores sadness and the past up close, warmly, through the character's pathological empathy, which is sometimes painful, but through which he enters into the stories of others. Thanks to this, we understand that behind the monstrous image of the Minotaur there is actually an abandoned three-year-old child, locked in the labyrinth beneath the palace. Also the history of the twentieth century, seen through the stories of the grandfather, the father, and the boy, takes on another meaning. This is a novel about empathy, through which we read the past and the world.
Time Shelter continues this theme on another level. The world has begun to lose its memory, literally and metaphorically; new “memory dealers,” politicians and populists have emerged who want to resurrect the twentieth-century past and turn it into a refuge from the present. This is a novel about the dark side of nostalgia and the trap of the past, especially if someone is trying to bring whole nations back into it.
The theme of death, and concerns about death, frequently recur in your prose. Is this inevitable when writing about the past?
When I was little, I lived with my grandparents. And with them, the topic of death was quite naturally and directly present, it was part of everyday life. My grandmother talked about it all the time, she had prepared the clothes she wanted to be buried in, and once a month she would show them to us, sometimes she would even try them on to see if they still fit her. The subject of death is with us from childhood in any case. I’ve researched childhood fears, and I know that the fear of losing your parents is one of the first we experience. And of course, when you talk about the past, it’s populated with people who are gone. But for me, it’s a complex and important topic. It’s part of the themes of time and memory, a natural part of the theme of the future as well. Because in the future, we won’t be here.
In both Time Shelter and The Physics of Sorrow, your namesake is the main protagonist. To what extent are these novels autobiographical?
Every story, even an autobiographical one, once it has passed through the act of telling and been put into words, is already fiction, it no longer belongs to me entirely. And conversely—every other person’s story that I read or listen to becomes mine as well. These books are not exactly autobiographical, rather, they are personal. And that’s more important to me. But in Time Shelter, Gaustine also claims that he is the narrator and protagonist, while I have been made up by him.
Can you tell us more about Gaustine, and what role he plays in your creative process?
Gaustine is everything that I, due to my limited body and time, cannot be. He feeds off this inability of mine. He witnesses all past times, he has an obsession with the past, the past is his homeland. He appeared for the first time in my poetry and stories. In The Physics of Sorrow we see his first experiments and his first failures, which are still innocent. In Time Shelter, his obsession with the past becomes dangerous. As time goes on, he becomes more real, unlike me. And he begins to claim that he invented me. I have constant dialogues with him, we argue and comment on the world, and that helps me bring different perspectives into my writing.
There is a large intertextual element to your novels, including references to Greek myths, Anna Karenina, Robinson Crusoe, to name but a few. To what extent is this a conscious decision? How does your prose interact with these titles? Who is your ideal reader?
Yes, Time Shelter was written in continuous conversation with other books, people and myths. All my books have been written that way, in fact. Culture is a continuous conversation, a hum of different voices, and it’s actually wonderful music, a sort of polyphony. We are not only immersed in that conversation, we are also part of it. Moreover, without a memory of these voices coming from different spheres and different centuries, literature and culture would be impossible. What was created before us becomes part of our world, culture becomes a second nature that has shaped us. Focusing on themes like time and memory, I can’t help but steer the conversation to the great minds who worked in this field, such as Einstein, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust—I consciously link science and literature because to me they arе not of a different order. Literature can be just as important to understanding the mechanisms of time as physics, or as important to the processes of memory as medicine. While I was working on Time Shelter, I had to research sciences like neurology, psychiatry, or religion. After the novel came out, for example, I participated in a debate on the subject of the end of time with theology professors. My ideal reader would simply be the person with a heart who is excited about the world and all living things. Reading is, among other things, an ongoing conversation with oneself and the author, but more important is the conversation with oneself.
You have recently published your memoir, The Story Smuggler in English, where you describe writers and translators as “smuggling” stories across borders. Can you talk about the clandestine, seemingly subversive nature of sending your prose abroad?
The Story Smuggler is a brief memoir about childhood and the feeling of abandonment that stays with us when we leave it. We are all immigrants from the only homeland we have ever known, that of childhood, and so afterwards, wherever we are, we feel homeless and abandoned. Homeless in time, because childhood is not a place, it’s not a home or a territory, but a time. There are many stories in the book that mix the everyday and the sublime, stories I carry with me wherever I go, smuggling them, sneaking them through the scanners of foreign airports. I continue to believe that our stories are our only life-preserving baggage, a treasure, sometimes a forbidden commodity, especially in authoritarian regimes.
In The Story Smuggler, you write about the Bulgarian concept of “T’ga,” an untranslatable word that describes a “longing, something unrealised, a dream of what has been lost forever or of what has never been achieved.” How is this explored in your prose?
Yes, you could say I’m an expert on sadness—and I’m only half-joking. I think we are made up of things like sadness, hesitation, hope, and it’s strange that there is no science devoted to them. Perhaps the only real science focused on these important things is literature and storytelling. Storytelling tames sadness, makes it bearable, makes us able to live with it. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I write. But there’s always a hint of laughter or irony in my writing, which is important because it helps us to overcome the sadness. Moreover, people in my childhood told their stories by mixing the sad and the comical. I also love that style of storytelling. And since the amount of sadness is increasing, considering what’s going on around us, I think we’re going to have to talk about it more and more.
How closely do you work with your translators? How important is it to be involved in the final translated version of a text?
I like working closely with my translators. I take my time, I’m interested in their questions, we discuss the meaning of this or that scene or expression. I realize that my books are not easy to translate because they rely a lot on language and on context. Most of the translators and I become friends. You know, the translator is the deepest reader who can exist. I’m grateful to have wonderful translators. For a language like Bulgarian, there are not that many translators. Sometimes they haven’t had a Bulgarian book to translate for decades. When my first novel, Natural Novel, came out in Croatian, it was the first Bulgarian book after twenty-five years of silence. This year, Time Shelter came out in Swedish, and it turns out that a Bulgarian novel had not been published in Sweden for forty-seven years. What’s a translator to do in the meantime? So things are very connected, writers and translators are in a particular symbiosis. That’s why the big prizes are often for both writers and translators. I’m lucky enough to work on English translations with the wonderful translator Angela Rodel, with whom I shared the International Booker for Time Shelter.
And here I would like to give special thanks to many of them: Marie Vrinat-Nikolov (French), Giuseppe Dell’Agata (Italian), Helle Dalgaard (Danish), Hanna Sandborgh (Swedish).
What does winning the International Booker Prize mean for both for you and for Bulgarian literature as a whole? Has it had a notable effect on the domestic literary market, or on the number of texts being translated from Bulgarian?
I’ll answer about Bulgarian literature first. Yes, interest in it has definitely started to change. I think this prize has opened the door and made writing in Bulgaria and this part of Europe more visible. This is part of the positive power and significance of this prize: highlighting voices and storytellers who are writing outside the perimeters of English.
For me, personally, I’m glad that Time Shelter with all its messages was read and recognized, that its form and style was appreciated. I get emails from readers all over the world who are excited about the book. By the way, the word “timeshelter,” which is a neologism, was chosen as one of the three words of 2023 in Bulgaria. After this award, I hope my other books, such as The Physics of Sorrow and my short story collections will also reach readers. However, more important than awards is what you have written and continue to write. It’s very nice when people stop me on the streets of Sofia and say “we read you before the award.”
