Here are all the songs featured on this episode:

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You can watch the video recording of this episode on and while you’re there, subscribe to Chad’s channel and stop by next Monday, April 16th at 9pm eastern for a very special episode that will feature Santiago Morrice AND Georgi Gospodinov himself! If you watch that episode you’ll have the opportunity to ask Georgi all the questions you want!

As always, The Physics of Sorrow (and all the previous Two Month Review titles) is available for 20% off through our Just use the code 2MONTH at checkout.

While you’re there, pick up a copy of by Dubravka Ugresic. This will be the next Two Month Review book, and we’ll release the schedule in the near future.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Follow and for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests.

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to It really helps people to discover the podcast.

The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Splendor and Misery, featuring Georgi’s translator, Angela Rodel!

So this piece is going to be a bit shorter. That’s OK. It’s poetry month, so I’ll embrace the brevity.

Number of poetry collections published, January-April by year:

2015: 28
2016: 33 (+18%)
2017: 43 (+30%)
2018: 21 (-52%)

What the shit is going on in 2018? This is crazy. I just went through SPD’s catalog and every translation publisher from 2017 and I got this. How disappointing.

I could try and break this precipitous fall-off down by publisher, language, country, translator, etc., but why bother. Either we’re missing something major, or the bottom is falling out and the boat is sinking. Regressing to the mean. Playing like the Cardinals. Whatever.

When it comes to translation statistics, 2018 is the worst. Like, literally.

Let’s just move on and check back in when there’s good news to share. Instead, let’s talk about actual poetry!

by Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir, translated from the Icelandic by K.T. Billey (Phoneme Media)

I feel like a terrible hypocrite.

For years I’ve advocated for the idea that anyone can read international literature, or “difficult” domestic literature, or, well, anything—you just had to dive in, give it a chance, let the book guide you and explain how to read it.

At the same time, I’ve written on this blog (and said on our podcasts) that I don’t read poetry. That I don’t get it. There are a bunch of “good” reasons I could trot out here about time and attention and my literary upbringing, and so on and forth, but if I’m being honest, I don’t read much poetry because it’s “beyond me.” I have none of the vocabulary to speak with poets or academics (not sure how much those vernaculars actually differ), I haven’t read nearly enough to feel confident in making my own connections (which I can do with fiction), and I don’t know what to say about it in a post (which is all that matters since I’m self-centered, like most people).

That last one is probably the most real. If I can’t figure out a fun way to write about/talk about a book, it’s dead to me. This is my way of engaging with the text—using it as a launching pad for other ideas, or going deep into it with my students or friends. When I try to write about international poetry, I feel like I’m way out of my depth and likely sound like an idiot. (More of an idiot, I suppose.)

But how shitty is that? How can I advocate for crazy, semi-experimental international fiction for the masses and then blatantly ignore a whole category of writing? Hypocrite.

One place to start is with the immediately visceral: Did I enjoy reading the poems in Stormwarning? I did! Since I’ve more or less sworn off jacket copy—I only judge a book by its front cover—I had no idea what to expect. Poems about Iceland, I assume, since Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir is Icelandic. But that’s as far as that idea went. (Although betting on some environmental/nature poetry slant would’ve seemed a safe bet given the title.)

Joy is a slippery term though. One I try and force my students to get past. “I really enjoyed reading this” doesn’t really signify anything concrete. What did you enjoy? The linguist puzzles? Fantastic descriptions of Quidditch matches? The humor? Sorrow? And isn’t this whole “I enjoyed it” a way of hiding the fact that you don’t really have anything else to say?

“Being Positive”

Go mountains!
Go clouds!
Go moss!

I enjoyed that. That sort of playful narrative voice—which, in my opinion, is both honest and ironic at once through the juxtaposition of esteem-centric cheers with natural objects that require no encouragement—is the thing I gravitate toward in poetry. Usually. I want my poetry to be understood on first pass, probably because I’m lazy and always trying to move on to the next book.

Another example of this from Stormwarning (and please, go from Phoneme so that they don’t shut me down for raiding their content):

“P������é”

Once everyone wanted to get to the moon.
It happened in the summer of 1969.
Then no one longed for the moon.
The moon is empty and abandoned.

Again, a bit ironic, a bit true, a bit humorous. Humor will get me most every time. That and poems/sections about aging. Especially if there’s a little seasoning of nostalgia. Like this bit from “In the Nursing Home”:

the dissolution is here
everything is
afloat
the self
the memory
the built-in locating equipment
we are all here
but also other places
and no one knows what happens next

Still, there’s a difference between pointing to something you like, and explaining what makes it good. I can’t do that with poetry, which is unfortunate, since listening to smart people talk about poetry in smart ways can be really entertaining.

I was hoping to find more reviews of Stormwarning to help guide me, but I’m honestly not even sure where exactly people review poetry collections in translation. I mean, there are reviews in Publishers Weekly and Modern Poetry in Translation, in places like The Brooklyn Rail, and in various academic journals, but that still seems kind of thin. I’m 100% sure these conversations are going on elsewhere, so please do @ me and let me know what to pay attention to!

For now though, with regard to Stormwarning, I’m going to leave it at this: I like the tone, I like the plain language. I also love these lines:

The day tomorrow will be worse
but that does not mean that the day today is not bad.

It’s a start.

Yeah this can’t end well
When the flames feel like hell
Put me on a pedestal
But you’ve been lying to yourself

And if that’s how you act
Then yes I would take it back
Memories that we had
Must hurt so bad
Don’t throw your hands up like that
Save the tears your bags are packed
Because it’s too late now to ever go back

It’s all because you said I was unlovable.

I feel ya, Chad Post! And check out the video:

Actually, don’t. This song feels like it was written by Apple’s “predictive text” technology, including that one inexplicable blip in the prediction that leads to some odd statements. (See lyric about “stole all my hair.”) And he pronounces words in ways that no other human being pronounces them. I can barely understand any of this, and it’s not just because I’m twice his age and my ears never stop ringing.

Instead, I would recommend reading all of the comments. Scratch that. I’d recommend reading this comment:

Judy Hages
1 week ago
This is one of the best music videos I have ever seen……….and I am 75years old!! Wow! Everyone associated with making this video should be incredibly PROUD!!! Wow!! Woo Woo and YIPPEE!! Judy Hages

But like a good infomercial—WAIT, THERE’S MORE.

Over at you can find this little book of Chad Post’s poems entitled, Death by Poetry and The Lies about Me. (If I’m ever drinking around you when this commercial comes on—take cover. I loathe this commercial, especially the gif ending with the woman making impressed hand gestures at that turd who stands there smug as . . . UGH. For me, this is the visual representation of the BuzzFeed aesthetic.)

Here’s a couple of Chad Post’s poems:

Every time you give
your heart the chance
to break you give your
soul the chance to fly.

chad post

And, one more:

The two things you need
most in life are
happiness and confidence
and both of those are
choices.

chad post

Yes, every poem ends with his name. No, I have no idea. Yeah, totally possible that you read that one in the dentist’s office last week. Sure, yeah, I’m glad to stick with my day job as well.

And here’s the thing. It’s only a matter of time before every Google search for me is replaced by this:

Given that he has <1,000 plays on Spotify and an EP coming out soon, I’ll give it a month before my image is swept away in the Unlovable Chad Post of it all . . . Hey, maybe I’ll get some cool new Twitter followers!

by Yoko Tawada, translated from the Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani (New Directions)

There was a moment around page 60 of Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary when I started asking myself if this was actually good, or bad, or something that’s neither and just a book that I’m supposed to like. It was almost a moment of crisis, as if I had been secretly drugged with something that made all words lose their meaning.

Which might actually be an aspect of the book and the future it posits:

Soybeans and buckwheat were still grown in the “Far West” of Tokyo, along with a new strain of wheat, but not enough was produced to export to other regions, and besides, these were crops that could be grown elsewhere. Long ago, the words “something new from Tokyo” brought to mind a plug attached to a long tail called a cord, but things like that didn’t sell anymore. Electrical appliances had met with disapproval ever since electric current was discovered to cause nervous disorders, numbness in the extremities, and insomnia—a condition generally known as bzzt-bzzt syndrome. Newspapers carried reports of chronic insomniacs who slept soundly at camping grounds in the mountains where there was no electricity. A popular writer published an essay on how the sound of the vacuum cleaner drove all thoughts of the novel he was writing out of his mind.

Back some weeks ago, I predicted this would make the National Book Award for Translation shortlist. I’m still going to back that idea, although it’s not my favorite book. The lightness of the tone and writing will likely appeal to a lot of readers, as will its fable-like qualities.

I was left with one major question though: This is set in a world that’s all divided up, dysfunctional following an undefined major disaster. Society is ordered by a whole new set of rules, old people can’t die, young kids are incredibly weak, there are all sorts of random holidays (like “Green Day” and “Red Day”), etc. And yet, in a world devoid of electrical appliances and, well, most foods, Yoshiro is still working as a novelist. I’m not sure if that’s supposed to make me feel hopeful, or like this book is just trolling itself.

Unfortunately, this book just isn’t for me. To be completely honest, I’m not sure if any of Tawada’s recent books are for me. I’m not into Memoirs of a Polar Bear (like that Axe ad, don’t get me going on books with talking animals), but I know a lot of people who are. I don’t want to take any potshots at her, her fans, her translators, or anything, since the sum total of my opinion about her last couple novels is an exaggerated shrug.

In some weird way, I ended up feeling like I have more to say about a book of poetry than about a novel that I should probably like. But I guess that if there’s a point to this filler post—aside from bringing the amazing (though unlovable) Chad Post to your attention—is that it’s OK to give something a try and then quit it. Trying makes the quitting OK.

I do want to write more about the difficulties in simply not liking a popular book—about the anxieties over the potential backlash, the idea that our group of people values books and reading at a total stratospheric level compared to most other people, about the need for works that are neither “the greatest!” or “the worst!”—but this is a filler post. More on that some other time.

You can watch the video recording of this episode on and while you’re there, subscribe to Chad’s channel and stop by next Monday, April 9th at 9pm eastern to They’ll be discussing “An Elementary Physics of Sorrow” and the “Conclusion,” and probably touching on Milkova’s literary interests, which include Russian Symbolist erotic poetry and Elena Ferrante.

As always, The Physics of Sorrow (and all the previous Two Month Review titles) is available for 20% off through our Just use the code 2MONTH at checkout.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Follow and for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests. And be sure to follow as well for more book information—especially about speculative fiction.

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to

The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Splendor and Misery, featuring Georgi’s translator, Angela Rodel!

There is an unedited version of this podcast—with maybe eight extra minutes of jokes—that you can watch on And be sure to come by next Monday, March 26th at 9pm to with Chad and Brian. They’ll be talking about Part VI (pages 179-200) and answering any and all of your questions.

As always, The Physics of Sorrow (and all the previous Two Month Review titles) is available for 20% off through our Just use the code 2MONTH at checkout.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Follow and for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests. And you can follow for more information about books and upcoming events. (Like the one on April 26th with Two Month Review alum Rodrigo Fresán!)

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to

The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Splendor and Misery, featuring Georgi’s translator, Angela Rodel!

Mazes and Spirals

Through these last couple of weeks, through all the wonderful guests and discussions and through the beautifully prose of The Physics of Sorrow, we’ve had the pleasure of unravelling a dark and complex piece. From the second week and onward it feels like each conversation ends with someone saying something along the lines of “we’re returning to so much” and “we’re getting deeper into this.”

As much as Gospodinov and his work are involved in the labyrinth as a historic and emotional metaphor, the spiral finds a place in understanding both the work and our discussion of it as readers. I will elaborate on this as the post winds on.

The Core of the Spiral

The first section of the Two Month Review, which included the Epigraphy, Prologue, and “The Bread of Sorrow,” set up the themes that Gospodinov revisits in the subsequent sections—this thought something I’ve already written in previous blog posts. These recurring elements include abandonment, the minotaur, the labyrinth, life in communist Bulgaria, the mythic, fathers, darkness, basements, and the like. Obviously, well-crafted books do this: build and return to themes. But Gospodinov treats his themes like he treats his family, and his imagination: he treats them like characters that are born, develop, and are perpetually at risk of losing everything and dying. These themes are more a part of the cast and less an abstraction that is built by the behavior of his human characters—not excluding Asterius with my use of “human.”

The second section, “Against an Abandonment: The Case of M,” presented us with public defender Gospodinov and his defense for the minotaur. This section developed our understanding of Gospodinov’s obsession with myth, particular the rich history and his own speculations on the myth of the Minotaur and its relationship to his own family and upbringing.

The third section, “The Yellow House,” returned us to stories of Gospodinov and his family in Bulgaria, and, again, routed us through the themes and characters established in the previous two sections. It is important to note that beyond this coiling of each section, Gospodinov adds more events, and friends, and family members but does so, frequently, through the established themes.

This fourth section, “Time Bomb (To be Opened After the End of the World),” has Gospodinov laying his plans bare and creates a confluence between the content of the book, the themes, characters, places, and discussions, with the form that Gospodinov has created, the short and somewhat related pieces within larger sections. We see, again, the themes at play with people and moments in his life. He returns us to his grandfather, introduces us to a school-aged, rebelliously insightful Gospodinov, shows us more facets to his stylistic abilities, and all around the intense discussion of time capsules. And as he works his way from time capsules on fridges, or time capsules launched into space, or buried into the ground, and as he spirals again around the elements that are important to The Physics of Sorrow it starts to become clear that, put simply, this book is a time capsule.

Along the Loops

This week’s section opens with “The Aging of an Empath” where Gospodinov discusses the eventual loss of his ability to embed, a side effect of aging, and, I’d add, an overexposure to humanity. Most importantly, he describes that his habit of hoarding objects is an attempt to counteract the loss of his Obsessive Empathetic-Somatic Syndrome, or “radical empathetic-somatic syndrome” as he (mis)remembers.

And this isn’t the first time that Gospodinov has described collecting objects, but this provides further insight into why he does. Collecting starts in “First Aid Kit for After the End of the World,” which lushly describes a young version of himself slowly preparing a kit, of sorts, to survive a nuclear attack, with goods and kind words included. And this pattern of collecting repeats.

He writes about how he hoards apocalypse-inspired headlines, mentions Mengele’s personal journals, the disks that the Voyager and Pioneer spacecrafts carried to give extraterrestrial life a glimpse into the glory of mankind via a recording of Jimmy Carter’s voice. He also writes about time capsules throughout the world, and a need to map the location of all of them, the need for a literary time capsule of all genres and trends, and the possible dangers of future humanoids stumbling upon our time capsules.

These acts of collecting are rooted in fear, from Gospodinov’s survival kit to NASA’s strange experiment, and are attempts to ameliorate said fears. Beautifully, this section—this entire work, rather, is engaging in this process. Through “First Aid Kit[. . .],” in the light of Gospodinov losing his embedding, we see him fracture his older self from his younger self, writing on his younger self as distinct person—almost writing as though there is a death that has separated these two individuals. And in response to this fear of further loss, Gospodinov has taken to collect and preserve moments. He collects newspaper headlines and discusses massive beehive death, and birds dropping from the sky. And even the popularity of time capsules mirrors fears of nuclear annihilation or apocalypse by another means. The time capsule ameliorates our fears as even if we are wiped from the face of the the earth, the collection of materials sustains our existence deep beneath the earth, or in space, or on the page.

That said, we can read all books as being time capsules of sorts—these obscure collections of thoughts and images that contain an interpretation of a past time for a future time—sure. But from the exchange between Chad, Brian, and Patrick, I’m convinced to separate The Physics of Sorrow from the over encompassing speculation of “books are time capsules” to the more accurate “The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov is a time capsule.” This idea was set up beautifully by a comment from Patrick, when he said, paraphrased, “the brokenness of the form is built for destruction.” Chad followed up by adding that missing a section—I’d argue referring to either the larger section of the books or the smaller units within each section—is ok (obviously read the whole thing, it’s good). The Physics of Sorrow is this greater vessel of smaller fragments, all related in some way yet distinct enough on their own, and—better yet—crafted with this comprehension of a bleak, possibly apocalyptic, future.

The Pioneer and Voyager disks contained fragments of mankind at a certain temporal locus, just as the Westinghouse Time Capsules, and the time capsule from the young Gospodinov’s school in Pleven. And The Physics of Sorrow is doing just what these time capsules are. Each fragment of each section standing on it’s own with its own commentary with its relationship to the characters and themes. The themes are sustained not by just one piece, but by many, just as the many characters come and go through the sections. Hypothetically, should the capsule crack, and most of the contents be destroyed (should you rip out a chunk of the book), the individual fragments elaborate on another so often, that missing one doesn’t destroy a reader’s ability to understand what Gospodinov accomplishes throughout the whole of The Physics of Sorrow. The minotaurs, the labyrinth, Bulgaria, Communism, abandonment, World War—all these elements repeat and deepen from fragment to fragment to create a sustained understanding of the book itself considering the threat of mass destruction.

Gospodinov’s Arc

This confluence of form and content that I’ve been speaking to is the most blunt with the paired sections of “Noah Complex” and “New Realism.” “Noah Complex” suggests that a encyclopedic time capsule of writing should be created including:

[. . .] monologue through Socratic dialogue to epos in hexameter, from fairytales through treatises to lists. From high antiquity to slaughterhouse instructions. Everything can be gathered up and transported in such a book.

This would contain writing from all times, and different styles and authors. And after all his tongue-in-cheek commentary on time capsules, each entry dripping with a quiet criticism of the futility, he writes in this section:

Only the book is eternal, only its covers shall rise above the waves, only the beasts inside, between its pages swarming with life, will survive. And when they see the new land, they will go forth and multiply [. . .] And what is written shall be made flesh and blood and shall be brought to life in all its perfection. And “the lion” shall become a lion, “the horse” will whinny like a horse, “the crow” will fly from the page with an ugly croak . . . And the Minotaur will come out into the light of day.

Adopting a sort of mystic prose, he places his faith in the book to be a suitable vessel for realities, relying on the readers imagination—a proxy for his own experienced embedding—to bring the worlds contained in this Noachian encyclopedia to life (as corny as it sounds), to change the animals, in quotes, into animals in flesh. I even feel a nod to his own work as he imagines the Minotaur out in the light.

Gospodinov gives us just that in this following section “New Realism,” where he drops us into a beautifully written realist narrative. Defined as “a faithful representation of reality” or “verisimilitude,” this section speaks to just that, as Gospodinov shifts styles yet again to make a point. I don’t even really know where to draw from to give the “best” example of his writing—the whole narrative speaks to that. It’s important to note that many of the authors from his Epigraphy were realists in their national literatures, and, relatedly the epigraphs from Flaubert and St. Augustine speak to the ability to embed and being able to suspend the fleeting moment as so that it may be experienced, at the very least, a second time.

This is the moment of union for this work, as a whole, between its form and content. Gospodinov, considering a singular death at one end and apocalypse at the other, collects a series of fragments to hopefully survive and be reopened. With his wit, he might even fear what the results may be, as we see in “Future Number 73,” where future humanoids find his Communist Youth Brigade inductee letter create a yearly bloodletting. I must say, I’m curious what a society of people who worship the ‘doctrine’ of “New Realism” would accomplish.

And Back Again Through the Spiral

This confluence of form and content, while emphasized in this section has been going on the entire time and I believe we can assume it will continue. Obviously, we can look at each section as these collections of ephemera, something to understand Bulgarian history following the death of the 2015 version of Georgi Gospodinov, but, specifically, there are sections throughout the book that mirror his time capsule form.

In the Prologue we saw that collection of entities, all seemingly alone if not interrelated by their isolation. In “The Bread of Sorrow” sections like “Trophy Words,” which documented the Hungarian words that his grandfather kept through national shifts and relocations, “Crumbling Language” and “G,” which both highlighted Gospodinov’s own adventures with language acquisition, and “A Short Catalogue of Abandonments,” which listed cases of abandonment from various myths around the world.

“Against an Abandonment: The Case of M” had the “Dossier” and “Myth and Game,” which were lengthy collections of (mis)representations of the Minotaur, while “Child-Unfriendly” and “Devoured Children in Greek Mythology (An Incomplete Catalogue)” both list injustices against children, in and out of myth.

“The Yellow House” featured a series of these catalogs, from “A Catalogue of Collections,” to “From a Catalogue of Important Erotic Scenes” to the various collections of accounts from the 1980s.

But this most recent section brings all these to the surface and discusses them head-on. And this is where I return to the spiral. A participant in the chat from last week’s podcast, one gabbiano117, wrote:

This really is the perfect book for reading and rereading again and again. The way it retreats and advances and circles and gets lost in itself again and again and again.

Gospodinov is writing something that coils upon itself, but also builds. He started the piece by explaining how his world works, and from that point provided examples that affirm his construction. And as we go onto the next section, I’m excited to see how else the spiral will progress, and how what form the Minotaur takes in another place and time.

The Craft of Gospodinov

Through “The Yellow House” we’re looking at—well—everything. Each of the short stories within provide flashes at the truth that Gospodinov is writing to unpack. And by the time I reached the end of this section, I felt fully immersed. When the chapter finished, I automatically ventured further as I felt fully prepared by Gospodinov to do so. I mean it when I say that this section left me blank, breathless. The book has done much to cement it’s sense of playfulness and wonder through its unconventional structure and mythic, pseudo-scientific content, and the rules of how this world works. But through this part we now see Gospodinov shine for his prose and its ability to draw a reader into its self-contained world.

The Personal Mythic

It is with this vigorous attention to prose that, throughout “The Yellow House,” Gospodinov returns to what he established in previous sections, such as the powerful orbit of the minotaur, and its relationship to abandonment and his life in Bulgaria. The opening piece is easily one of the strongest. At its most basic, it’s a short work of mystery, with a little bit of Gothic spice here and there with the otherworldly properties and suspense. The second paragraph reads like it could have been pulled from an early American horror serial:

One evening, passing by there, I heard a chilling howl. There was something excessive and inhuman in that howling or bellowing, something from the mazes of the night Ooooooooohhh . . . That endless Oooohh dug tunnels in the silence of the early November evening.

And there we are, drawn in to this strange space where nothing is truly certain, and it’s here that we find our protagonist, the young Gospodinov. This story continues as such, with him traversing the dark countryside outside of this deserted insane asylum, attempting to speculate what—or who— is howling—or possibly mooing—from its depths, and, later, trying to figure out what his father was doing there. This arc continues in “My Brother, the Minotaur,” where the nature of the mystery turns from halls of the asylum with their peeling paint to the halls of his own mind, as he attempts to deduce what—or who—was calling out to him from the center of that labyrinth. And his imagination runs wild. He first speculates that:

That inhuman howl really was inhuman, and it wasn’t Ooooh, but Moooo. And it came from a half-man, half-bull locked up in there. (I’d already seen one such boy in my grandfather’s hidden memory.) [. . .]

And from here he’s left, haunted about his fate and his relationship to the Minotaur (Asterius, is that you?), as he suspects that he and the minotaur are brothers through numerous imaginative acrobatics.

The Diagnosis

In this section we even return to embedding. This time, we have a diagnosis for this bizarre ability: pathological empathy or obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome (which, as far as we can tell author Gospodinov has created for this piece specifically). This condition is marked, neurologically, by some kind of hyperactivity in the same regions of the brain that allow for empathy, but, for people like Georgi, it becomes too strong of a feeling and places the brain in a trance-like state while the victim fully constructs, or possibly invades, the memory or imagination of another.

There’s even a kind of somatic confirmation of this, which is seen following an MRI:

The picture hadn’t come out. Maybe it was due to the machine, it was old, after all. Actually, this was the first time something like this had happened to them, absolutely nothing could be seen, just a dark-black plate. This didn’t come as a surprise to me. I know nothing can be seen, because inside is darkness, an unilluminable, centuries-deep darkness. My skull is a cave. I didn’t tell them that, of course.

The Myth of the Gospodinovs

We’re also met with numerous short and sweet stories about our young narrator and his family where the mythic is drawn upon to contextualize the experiences of him and his family. In “Nippers,” the theme of abandonment is intersected once again by Greek myths, while in “Mother Bean” the children are told to avoid playing in the gardens or the mothers of vegetables will go after them. It’s here that a young Georgi beautifully remarks, “Everything had a mother, only we didn’t. We had grandmothers.”

A Brief and Wondrous History of Bulgaria

A bulk of “The Yellow House” has Gospodinov recounting life in Communist Bulgaria. We’re given lectures on Bulgaria through sections like “A Private History of the 1980s,” and “An Official History of the 1980s,” which highlight Georgi’s own role in the deaths of numerous Soviet Union leaders (and the relationship of that to his love life). Amongst these are series of catalogs, such as the “Catalog of Collections,” which details Gospodinov’s obsession with collected abandoned things, to the two-part “The Sexual Questions” and “From a Catalog Of Important Erotic Scenes,” which highlight the humor that pervades Gospodinov’s storytelling—no matter how grim the discussion.

All We Are is Dust in the Wind

The section I wanted to focus on the most was “The Metaphysics of Dust,” nestled in the first third of “The Yellow House.” It describes in full beautiful sensory detail—almost spiritually so—a return to a nostalgic place. The piece opens:

I’ve fallen asleep on the windowsill. I wake up from the sun shining through the dirty glass, a warm afternoon sun. Still in that no man’s land between sleep and afternoon, before I return to myself, I sense that soaring and lightness, the whole weightlessness of a child’s body. Waking up, I age within seconds. Crippling pain seizes my lower back, my leg is stiff. The light in early September, the first fallen leaves outside, the worry that someone may have passed by on the street and seen me.

We’re met with lush descriptions that bounce between the senses and accomplish a lot—with very little—to create a sense of immersion. While we’re beautifully drawn into this scene, Gospodinov starts to layer this prosodic depth with some of the ‘physics’ that’s he’s guided us to throughout the piece—in this case the relationship between light and time that he introduced in the previous section, “Against an Abandonment: The Case of M.” He’s already performing routines that we’re familiar with, such as the warping of perception, but as he’s worked so hard for us to understanding how his world works he’s now able to fully engage with more artistic prose. He continues:

I climb down from the window carefully, unfolding my body, instead of simply jumping down. The room, lit up by the autumn sun, has come alive. One ray passes right through the massive glass ashtray on the table, breaking the light down into its constituent colors. Even the long-dead, mummified fly next to it looks exquisite and sparkles like a forgotten earring [. . .] The Brownian motion of the dust specks in the ray of light . . . The first mundane proof of atomism and quantum physics, we are made of specks of dust. And perhaps the whole room, the afternoon and my very self, with my awkward three-dimensionality are being merely projected [. . .]

Just as we were first drawn to his perspective, which seems to be a timeless narrator pulled between his youth and age and he’s filled with both whimsy and stiff joints at the same time, we’re now being dispersed into the universe with the dust and drifts throughout the room and the light that pours in through the windows. And as we’re already familiar with, Gospodinov returns to his own whimsical, emotional physics with more feeling—more depth. The piece moves into a collection of moments, something we see in different forms throughout “The Yellow House,” and the manner in which these moments are built further obstructs our ability to sense time at this moment—as readers—as we almost see the narrator stretch himself across space and time within the confines of this room:

I recalled the darkness, the scent of Pine-Sol, the whirring of the machine. Everything in the movie theater was made from that darkness and a single beam of light. The headless horseman arrived along the beam, as did the great Rocky Mountains, the Grand Canyon; horses and Indians, whooping Sioux tribes, geometrical Roman legions, and ragged Gypsy caravans headed for the heavens kicked up dust along it, Lollobrigida and Loren came down that beam, along with Bardot, Alain Delon and his eternal rival Belmondo [. . .] I would turn my back on the screen and peer into the beam coming from the little window at the back of the theater. It swarmed with chaotically dancing particles. [. . .] I watched the specks of dust and tried to guess which would turn into lips, an eye, a horse’s hoof or Lollobrigida’s breasts, which flashed by for an instant in one scene . . .

Gospodinov pulls the readers across a span of ephemera, as he warned us through his epigraphy, and while the prose here is as beautiful as the rest of the section, he has also given us an outline of what we are to expect throughout the section, right down to the feelings, actors, and archetypes. And, mystically, he tells us that there’s more, more that he can’t tell us directly, through the use of ellipses. We can speculate here, as these could be the lapses in his own memory, or a daring moment where the narrator can’t tell us something that is pulled back to his memory of the movie theatre. While I’m focusing on these opening paragraphs, clumsily pulling the enter short here, I could easily draw from any moment of this short piece, and such a homogeneity of wonder throughout this section attests to Gospodinov’s clear vision that I first wrote two in the introductory post weeks ago.

I return to some of the sentiments that the gentlemen shared during the podcast last week. In “The Yellow House” Gospodinov shows us what he was capable of. During one of the previous discussions, one participant—I believe Brian—noted that there wasn’t necessarily something pulling them through the piece. They were reading it, they were enjoying it, but—to paraphrase—the magic of the piece wasn’t sustaining the reading experience.

And I would agree with that commentary. While the work was interesting, and challenging, it felt like Gospodinov might not have been leading us anywhere concrete. There were so many disparate sections, with loose narration, followed by the formal shifting in Part II, and these changes forced me, as a reader, into anywhere from discomfort—anxiety at worst—to a disinterest towards what would come next. But what arrived through Part III was a strong return to what we know. Instead of shifting expectations once more with formal manipulation, Gospodinov was able strengthen the themes of the previous sections with a stunning attention to prose. And, in retrospect, the structure of the previous sections was needed to draw a reader to enough of a familiarity with the work as to give Gospodinov free reign to give us his best.

Mythic Degrees of Libel

The construction of this section, as Chad pointed out during the podcast, is strange when considering a more conventional novel. The first section of the piece, “The Bread of Sorrow,” despite being composed of short, formally disconnected sections, was bound together by the narrator’s ability to embed himself in the memories of those around him. Whether he jumped from his great grandfather’s memories, to the memories of a slug being shoved in a wound for the restorative properties of its mucous, to his own experience living in a basement as an ant god, or some other entity of another importance, the reader is carefully guided through sensory leaps sustained by a common focal point via the narrator.

“Against an Abandonment: The Case of M.” (which interestingly enough follows “Dad, What’s a Minotaur?” the last subsection of Part I) challenges readers yet again by forcing them into a mythic courtroom, where Gospodinov, newly appointed public defender, makes a case against the public representation and subsequent treatment of Asterius (the name given to him by Pasiphae, his mother), Minotaur of Minos. What develops here still draws upon the previous. We return to the minotaur as a mythic core, we return to a young Gospodinov and his family, and we return to discussions of dark basements and abandonment through children. With these root subjects in mind, Gospodinov has changed the shape of the piece. Where we previously had short narratives we now have arguments, historical accounts, character testimonies, and the like. Gospodinov presents his case to the Honorable Mr. Minos who is pulled from the underworld to serve as the judge in this case.

The Minotaur is not guilty. He is a boy locked up in a basement. He is frightened. They have abandoned him. I, the minotaur.

From here, Gospodinov does his best to build his grandfather’s case by outlining the historical misrepresentation of Asterius and clearly outlining who is at fault.

They have Abandoned Asterius

Gospodinov draws on numerous historians, both real and constructed, to provide testimony to the misrepresentation of Asterius. Ovid’s descriptions paint him as a “double-natured shame” and a “disgrace from his abode.” He draws on Seneca, who did his best to smear the reputations of both Asterius and his mother. Additionally, Dante “The Inferno” Alighieri, placed Asterius as a guardian and torturer on the seventh circle of hell—the circle of violence—while, in the same stroke of his quill placed King Minos in the second circle—the circle of lust—which is just slightly closer to God’s love. Virgil, who approached Asterius with the same ‘neutral’ language as Apollodorus, is not free of guilt as Gospodinov highlights that this kind of neutrality is still soaked in revulsion, as Virgil described Asterius as the “result of unnatural relations.”

And beyond these literary misrepresentations of Asterius, visual arts were often inspired by the disgust of these authors and saw such revulsion to its inevitable end. Gospodinov notes the obsession in visual art with Asterius’ death, noting a series of frescoes that depict the moment when Theseus has Asterius by the horn, and ready to kill it. And we’ve been led to experience a deep satisfaction, thanks to depictions like these and ideologies spread by the aforementioned authors. This profound pleasure of killing one who we have marked as guilty and inhuman is continued into the 20th and 21st centuries with three-dimensional representations of Asterius in video games, Gospodinov argues.

While World of Warcraft, where the Minotaur-inspired “Tauren” race stood as a politically nearsighted parallel for Indigenous American people (often nomadic, driven from their home lands by brutal conquerors, ‘noble savages’), God of War provided a moment for the player to experience that Thesian satisfaction. As I, through god-killer Kratos, grabbed them by the horns and thrust my sword into their hearts, dragging the blade throat-ward, I giggled with glee as I was rewarded with healing magics and extra experience points for performing the most brutal possible takedown of Asterius’ kind.

Gospodinov, I turn to you, as guilty as many of these writers and artists and designers. And Asterius, I look into your large, dark eyes, and I am deeply sorry.

Asterius is a boy locked in a Basement. He is frightened.

But while he is hidden away in the labyrinth, and branded as a sin, Asterius is nothing more than the result of generations of guilt and sin before him. But, additionally, he is forced to bare the weight that his forefathers refused to. Pasiphae’s lust for Poseidon’s white bull was the direct result of King Minos’ obstruction of a direct order from the god of the sea. Additionally, he received the white bull after asking for a blessing as so that he could overpower his brothers for control of Crete. Furthermore, the Athenian youths that were sent as a sacrifice to Crete were the result of an age old conflict where the Athenians killed the son of another Cretan king—who then went on the decimate Athens. Asterius serves as nothing more of a vessel to be filled with the sins of the men before him, as this small list of transgressions could go on for eons in the imagination of the right historian.

Gospodinov also traces the history of the Trojan computer virus, from the Trojan war horse, to Daedalus, master inventor of the Aegean Sea. He points to the Daedalan Cow—the cow-shaped contraption that allowed Pasiphae to copulate with Poseidon’s white bull. But while Asterius is branded an unnatural beast, a veritable unnatural union is a fake cow, that in the words elder Augustine:

[. . .] Fly and ram, tulip and oak do not copulate.

The mistake made was not by Asterius, but by Daedalus, the architect of this unnatural creation, and King Minos, for defying Poseidon—we can keep peeling the layers of history back, finding transgression behind slaughter, behind greed, and so on. Yet, we are called to cheer as Asterius is dragged lifeless from his prison, time and time again, into the light of day.

Asterius is not Guilty

And from this deep dive into Asterius and his monstrous historicization, Gospodinov looks then to all the children of greek myth, and their absence. He points out that throughout myth, children are eaten, in what can be almost seen as a tradition. “Where there is Time, there is light,” he states, and with this reasoning the only safe place for children to hide is in the dark, as did Asterius, as did narrator Gospodinov, and his father, and his grandfather, and so on. In many ways, Gospodinov took the position of public defender for the shamed Asterius to bring to light the sins that children are forced to bear—and how they carry the weight of the generations before them.

Even our beloved narrator, at a point, was threatened to be devoured. He writes of a particularly titanic aunt:

I had an aunt who always threatened to eat me up every time she came to visit. Huge and hulking, a distant offshoot of the Titan’s line, she would stand in front of me, spread wide her enormous arms with their rapaciously painted nails, bare her teeth malevolently, two silver caps sparkling, and would slowly step toward me with a deep growl coming from her belly. I would curl up into a ball, screaming, while she shook with laughter. She didn’t have any children, she must have devoured them.

But this doesn’t exist as an isolated occurrence within his family alone. He also recalls the experience of a friend, describing a photograph:

It’s an ordinary baking pan, large, with indelible traces of endless use. The rice has been washed and lightly steamed, amid the white—little balls of black pepper. You can clearly see that the stove has been switched on, the oven door is open, and two hands are carrying the tray toward it. There’s just one unusual detail—that’s no chicken or turkey on top of the rice, but a baby, naked and alive. I almost said raw. It’s lying on its back, its arms and legs in the air. It is clearly only a few days old and weighs no more than a middling turkey.

And as clarified by our round table, the traces of these mythic situations still linger today, as adults still talk about how sweet their children are and threaten to eat their toes during playtime. All this darkness, and devouring of children, leads us back to Gospodinov’s core myth: Asterius in the labyrinth.

There, in that damned place, while the entirety of history brands him a monster, and artists make iteration after iteration of his death hoping to get as close as possible to their audiences experiencing it firsthand, he exists as nothing more than a child. Thrown into the timeless darkness and fed children—as only adults could think that makes sense (bulls are herbivores, Gospodinov reminds us. Only following his final moments is he allowed to be brought to the light. In a state of timelessness he is maintained, until he is made example of for the wrong reason to the wrong audience.

Before I end this post, I want you to take one more look at the painting I shared above: Asterius, with either Ariadne’s twine or his own bindings in hand, mouth slightly ajar, out in bright daylight looking over the ocean as the wind blows through the soft tufts of his fur—contemplating the infinity of a well-lit day.

Asterius is all abandoned children, vessels of the sins of their forefathers, forced into the dark, twisted, and consumed when needed.

Probably the Open Letter title that Tom Roberge likes the best, The Physics of Sorrow came out in 2015 and has continuously moved up our list of best-selling titles. It was a finalist for the 2015 PEN Literary Award for Translation and won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature. It walso was a finalists for both the Strega Europeo and Gregor von Rezzori awards. And won multiple honors in Bulgaria. It’s in it third (?) printing now, and is available from better bookstores everywhere, or If you use 2MONTH at checkout, you’ll even get 20% off!

Here’s a brief description:

Using the myth of the Minotaur as its organizing image, the narrator of Gospodinov’s long-awaited novel constructs a labyrinth of stories about his family, jumping from era to era and viewpoint to viewpoint, exploring the mindset and trappings of Eastern Europeans. Incredibly moving—such as with the story of his grandfather accidentally being left behind at a mill—and extraordinarily funny—see the section on the awfulness of the question “how are you?”—Physics is a book that you can inhabit, tracing connections, following the narrator down various “side passages,” getting pleasantly lost in the various stories and empathizing with the sorrowful, misunderstood Minotaur at the center of it all.

Like the work of Dave Eggers, Tom McCarthy, and Dubravka Ugresic, The Physics of Sorrow draws you in with its unique structure, humanitarian concerns, and stunning storytelling.

Angela Rodel—who, almost single-handedly has brought Bulgarian literature to English readers—translated this and will definitely be a guest this season. Along with Georgi himself, who is currently in New York City as a Cullman Center fellow.

And . . . some surprises. Actually, I have a few new wrinkles in mind that may well make this the greatest Two Month Review season ever. Stay tuned for details.

How can you do that? By following and on Twitter. Or by joining the

And here’s the official schedule of what will be covered in each of the episodes:

February 15: Introduction to Gospodinov
February 22: Epigraphy, Prologue, Part I (1-58)
March 1: Part II (59-72)
March 8: Part III (73-118)
March 15: Part IV (119-150)
March 22: Part V (151-178)
March 29: Part VI (179-200)
April 5: Part VII (201-236)
April 12: Part VIII (237-283)

Order your book now! We’ll rush these out so that you have plenty of time to read the first 58 pages before the 22nd . . .

Both and are available through the and if you use 2MONTH at checkout, you’ll get 20% off.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Follow and for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests. And be sure to read all of Mara’s translations, including The Boys by Toni Sala and Wonderful World by Javier Calvo.

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to

The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Els Surfing Sirles.