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Booker Prize-winning Georgi Gospodinov on why political pasts need not be reinvented

International Booker Prize-winning Georgi Gospodinov was in town for the Sharjah International Book Fair

For someone who responds to the contention that Bulgaria might just be the saddest place in the world, Georgi Gospodinov is surprisingly cheerful. Like most self-assured thinkers and writers, Gospodinov is happy to take gentle digs at what he calls the ‘Bulgarian sorrow’ (“we are champions of sorry,” he remarks) and possesses the ability to dissect social and political milieus to show how these impact people’s lives. Sample this: his 2011 novel The Physics of Sorrow centres on the idea of weaponising the past where one of the protagonists develops an affliction called pathological empathy as he enters other people’s memories.

His International Booker Prize-winning novel Time Shelter revolves around a psychiatrist who creates a clinic of the past to treat dementia patients, with each floor dedicated to a decade. Soon, referendums are held across Europe to decide which decade should each country be transported to. Written in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum of 2016, the novel is an incisive examination of the dangers of revisiting a political past. The Bulgarian poet and writer, who was in Sharjah recently to attend the Sharjah International Book Fair, spoke at length about the complexities of modern societies and why political becomes personal. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Tell us about your formative years. What did growing up in Bulgaria in the 1970s look like?

All my books actually have a connection with my childhood years. I began to write because of the nightmares I had when I was a child. I was living with my grandparents back then. I wanted to tell someone about these nightmares but there was a belief that you must not talk about your nightmares because then they come true. I just began to write down my nightmares. After I wrote it down on a piece of paper, I never had these nightmares again. This was the first miracle of writing that I experienced. You are saved from your fears.

I used to listen to my grandparents’ stories. It was an important experience for me — the storytelling of old people in Bulgaria. It was my first lesson in writing. I used to live in a small town. We were a bit like abandoned children. Our parents were very young, they used to work very hard. We stayed alone in our rooms because they did not have enough places in the kindergarten. I remember this as ‘loneliness in my childhood’, which was a good time for my thinking. I was always reading. Books were my consolation. Seventies was also a time of socialism in Bulgaria. The crisis was not very acute at this time, though.

When did you turn to poetry?

In the seventies. I started to write poetry. My mother found my poems and showed them to the only poet in our town. He liked them and encouraged me to write. I wrote about how we grow cold, how we would die, topics that are considered unusual for kids to write about. But kids too think about death. I was always considered a poet who writes novels. And I continue to write poetry even now.

When you are a poet writing prose, what sort of influences do you carry into the latter?

The language is important in both. People usually think in prose, language is used to narrate some subjects. I write my novels like poetry. For me, every sentence is important. That’s why my books are not very easy to translate. The rhythm of my prose is very close to the poetry I wrote before. I don’t believe there is a big difference between genres.

In 2010, The Economist wrote an article calling Bulgaria the saddest place on earth. In response, you wrote a novel, The Physics of Sorrow, that has a protagonist who can enter other people’s memories and eventually develops an affliction called “pathological empathy”. Did the book come out of a sense of anger?

No. I wrote it many years ago to explain the Bulgarian sorrow. The Physics of Sorrow is a bildungsroman, where I drew from Greek mythology and the Minotaur story (in Greek mythology, Minotaur is half-man, half-bull who is imprisoned in a labyrinth where he devours Athenian sacrifices). I have two parallel stories — the history of a minotaur and the history of a boy who is spending 1970s alone in a room waiting for his parents. These are two parallel stories of abandoned kids, parallel stories of kids. Only when I was done with the novel did I read the article in The Economist. It was actually a bit funny, because we have never really been champions of anything, and here we were being called world champions of sorrow.

The book is a long answer to the question of Bulgarian sorrow.

Bulgarian sorrow is kind of unique; it is connected to things that never happened. We dreamt about many things that did not happen. It is also a silent sorrow. There is a culture of silence in Bulgarian society. We could not speak easily about our feelings. Maybe it has something to do with patriarchy or our socialist past. Bulgarian sorrow is close to a longing for places you have never been to, but you nurture nostalgia about them. Sorrow is also a human condition. You will not find one dictator who has sorrow. Only normal human beings experience sorrow.

There is also a Bulgarian term to describe sorrow.

Tuga — it is a short word. It is a very difficult word to translate because every language has its own concept of sorrow. We don’t just translate a word, we translate the concept. It is very important to find similar concepts in other languages.

And the character has pathological empathy in the novel.

I invented this condition. Once I met a doctor to find out if there was a medical reference for it. I do believe it exists. This is a very important feeling. What we see in the world today is deficit of empathy. I believe literature and storytelling could develop empathy. My character in The Physics of Sorrow suffers from extra feelings of empathy because when you are deeply empathetic you are able to feel others’ sorrow. You share their sorrow. That’s why empathy is a kind of suffering.

Time Shelter, your International Booker-winning novel, is about a psychiatrist who develops a clinic of the past to treat dementia patients. Every floor of this clinic allows a person to enter a decade of their lives where they were most happy and content. How did this idea take root?

I was always interested in the subject of memory. Once, I found a newspaper article 15 years ago where they said a doctor had [found] if you make Alzheimer’s patients listen to the music they remember from the past, they feel better. I started to wonder what if we built clinics of the past? In the latter part of the novel things get darker. The European Union referendum of 2016 made me think what if there was a glitch in time and one could travel to the past. Populism too got stronger around the world during this time. The book is dystopic.

Time Shelter is a cautionary tale against romanticising the past. What are the dangers of doing so?

That is because the past too has a dark side. It’s also because we live in the present and our kids live in tomorrow, and if we have to catch up, we cannot keep living in the past. You cannot stay in the past for a long time. You cannot be ‘great again’. Personally, you cannot be young again. So when leaders say they will put you back in the past, they set a trap. Personal past is non-reversible, but political past can be reversible. That’s why politically, looking back can be tricky.

You were delivering a talk in Berlin when someone remarked that Bulgarian, or Balkan, literature should engage with local themes and not broader issues. How do these stereotypes about who can write what hurt an author? Secondly, would you say your writing is more political than personal?

It is a stereotype. When I won the Booker Prize, I said that it was important for me to show that we can tell big stories in small languages. Don’t expect us to exoticise our countries, our origins. When I read my book in Berlin, I told them even in Bulgaria people fall in love, get divorced and die natural death instead of being knifed in their chest. We have the right to tell stories about the big things. I write personal stories that sometimes involve politics, ideologies involved in everyday life. I tell you how personal lives of people are broken when you are told not to travel abroad. If you are trying to tell the history of the world, begin with telling the history of the person who lives in this world.

As a keen observer of life and politics, what do you think explains Europe’s obsession with its past?

That is probably because Europe has a robust past. The problem is when the past is used for propaganda. As a writer, I am on the side of the past; I like to tell stories about the past. But the past that is important to me is the personal past, not something that happened five centuries ago. When someone tries to use the past as a weapon just to enchant you, it is dangerous.

What does winning the Booker change for the writer within?

The hardest thing is to find a place to hide and write your next book (laughs). I have learnt to say no to some invitations. The good thing is that you are able to reach the readers who you couldn’t earlier. My next book is very personal and will have a very different kind of writing.

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