Georgi Gospodinov: ‘The Minotaur was an abandoned child’.

Read below the exclusive interview given by Georgi Gospodinov to Grigoris Bekos for *To Vima*, on the occasion of the publication of his novel *On the Physics of Melancholy* (translated by Alexandra Ioannidou). Postmodern Balkan literature. To many, the combination of these words seems incongruous. After all, all three are burdened by misconceptions or prejudices. The truth, however, is that there have always been literary circles in South-Eastern Europe dedicated to producing literature that is high-quality, experimental and, at the same time, demanding, sometimes at the cutting edge of artistic exploration. Those who have read works by Danilo Kiš, Milorad Pavić or Dubravka Ugrešić, for example, will certainly welcome the first appearance in Greek of a book by Georgi Gospodinov.Myth and biographyThe Bulgarian author, born in 1968 in the town of Yambol, one of the most widely translated and internationally recognised writers, introduces himself to us with his novel On the Physics of Melancholy. It is a charming and strange book organised (and expanding in a branching manner) around a central image, the Minotaur. It is essentially a unique blend of myth and biography (the latter in the broadest sense of the term, as it is not merely personal, but familial and social, and ultimately national).The other day, when he spoke to ‘To Vima’, Georgi Gospodinov had just landed from a business trip to Spain. At the start of this summer, he had returned to Sofia from New York, where he spent a whole year as a fellow at the renowned New York Public Library (NYPL) and the Cullman Center. ‘Actually, I’m not entirely sure if I’ve returned. In the meantime, my new book, ‘All Our Bodies’, has been published. It contains very short stories; the shortest is three words long and the longest is about a page and a half. In fact, at a presentation in Burgas, I met a Greek translator who told me he’d managed to get some of my short stories published in a few anthologies. In short, it’s a bit of a chaotic time at the moment. Autumn is distracting me. I’m waiting for the rains so I can carry on writing my new novel uninterrupted.’ From poetry to the novel Things weren’t always like this, though. Because Georgi Gospodinov started out as a poet, and an award-winning one at that. What drove him to the novel? ‘Ah, back when I wrote only poetry, that was the golden age. And I still wonder why on earth anyone decides to write novels. Human life is far too short for truly great novels; I mean the great ones, not the lengthy ones. All the more so for someone who writes slowly when tackling this genre, like me. Essentially, though, I don’t think I ever abandoned poetry. Even when I write novels, which are quite mad, I always try to slip my poetry into them, secretly and surreptitiously. My first, *The Natural Novel*, was a direct result of what I’m telling you. I had never written prose before. I told myself I had the right to fail; I felt free; I wanted to give it a go and then return to poetry. And completely unexpectedly, the novel began to cross borders and was translated into around 20 languages, which surprised me a little. I didn’t like, of course, the mould of such a job, being confined to a single genre and producing a novel every two years. That is precisely why I continued to write poetry, short stories, plays, a libretto for an opera or a graphic novel. Until I had accumulated enough stories for the next novel. The good thing about the novel, as I understand it, is that it can encompass all the other genres like a womb. The novel is like Noah’s Ark. And in exactly the same way, ‘On the Nature of Melancholy’ emerged.The History of Melancholy This book has a labyrinthine form. Why? ‘The labyrinth is the natural form taken by our narratives, but also by our lives. Start telling a story, for example, and you will soon realise how often you stop, go back, unconsciously veer off in other directions, and take side paths. That is the form! And I wanted my novel to follow it because there is a voice in the book, that of the protagonist, which narrates in the first person the stories of his father and grandfather, the story of the Minotaur, but also the story of melancholy, not only of the 20th century but of the present day as well. Tell me, was there any way for all this not to be a labyrinth? The labyrinth is situated more vertically in time than in space. So there are no postmodern traps here. On the contrary, I address the readers directly and tell them, ‘this is where we stop’. Because we no longer write our novels as we did in the 19th century, and I say this with some disappointment. The novel, however, is not a train that departs from point A to arrive linearly at point B. The novel is a labyrinth into which we all enter of our own free will to set free, within its corridors, our own Minotaurs, our demons and our fears. There are solitary Minotaurs lurking within each of us.’Childhood abandonmentGeorgi Gospodinov forces us to see a side of the Minotaur that many of us had not even considered, namely his ‘silenced story’. ‘If we read the myth carefully, with a little compassion, we will discover an incredible injustice that has long been concealed. The Minotaur was, in fact, an abandoned child, who at the age of 3 or 4 was locked away by his father, Minos, in the underground chamber. I have read everything in ancient literature concerning the Minotaur and found not a shred of mercy for him, beyond ‘monster’, ‘shame’ and so on. The theme of child abandonment is one of the book’s central themes. The first image that came to mind when I started writing it was a memory of myself as a young lad in a small town in southern Bulgaria in the 1970s. I’m sitting by the window. Our home was a single room, located in the basement – or rather, the semi-basement. The window was at street level; my parents hadn’t come home from work yet. I was alone and scared, curled up on the windowsill, watching the last light of the late afternoon. Behind me, inside the room, a thick darkness stretched out. I entered this memory as I was thinking about the novel and, at some point, I realised that there was another such creature living alone in a dark labyrinth. In this way, the Minotaur boy of myth and the Minotaur boy from the 1970s came together in my text. That is where it all began. “It is, however, also a novel that highlights, I believe, both the shift in our perspective and the importance of empathy, which helps us to see others with fresh eyes,” emphasised the Bulgarian author.The narrator in the book, his alter ego, suffers from ‘pathological empathy or obsessive empathic-somatic syndrome’. It may sound frightening, but it is absolutely essential. ‘I cannot imagine how anyone could write fiction without this hyper-empathy. In the novel, this ability—or affliction—is the way in which the protagonist enters into the stories of his ancestors, as well as into the bodies of other living things.”We then discussed with Georgi Gospodinov the incredible scene in which he describes the ‘living museum of socialism’ with his compatriots. He had previously edited a volume with the telling title I Lived Through Socialism – 171 Personal Stories. Is there such a thing as positive and negative nostalgia? ‘As a writer, collecting personal stories is of the utmost importance to me. Bulgarian ‘real socialism’ appeared peaceful and mild, yet, like any totalitarian regime, it eroded and corrupted each individual. In reality, people feel nostalgia for their past and their youth, but in a foolish way they believe, or have been conditioned to believe, that their youth and ‘real socialism’ are naturally intertwined. ‘Well, they aren’t!’ emphasised the author, who, moreover, makes some apt observations about ‘small nations’ and their syndromes. Are there, correspondingly, such literary syndromes? ‘The periphery is full of stories and, often, the way in which its writers tell them is far bolder than that of the centre. The problem is stereotypes. For example, I once received the following response from a major Western publishing house regarding *On the Nature of Melancholy*: ‘Your novel is very good, but it isn’t Eastern European enough.’The Neighbours’ SyndromeIn the end, we wondered together why, even though we are so close, we know so little about one another. ‘Ancient Greek literature and philosophy were part of my literary education and, over time, became part of my personal interests. Especially from the twentieth century onwards, Cavafy, Seferis and Kazantzakis were an essential part of my reading as a young man. To be honest, however, I am not very familiar with the literary output in Greece over the last three decades, just as I imagine you do not know much about contemporary Bulgarian literature. This is a typical neighbourly syndrome; neighbours usually don’t take much interest in one another. A lack of curiosity and a host of stereotypes. A while ago, a writer from Central Europe said, with great arrogance, that no one expects a great novel from Bulgaria, at most a tomato of exceptional quality. That’s how you talk if you’ve internalised the stereotypes. In any case, I think the situation has started to change. If you’re a Bulgarian who travels to Greece quite often, or the other way round, a Greek who frequently visits Bulgaria, and you’ve tasted a good wine, the local fish or tomatoes, the moment will inevitably come when you seek something more, something to read about this country or to become a little more curious about other issues concerning it. I have the feeling that this is the moment we are in right now, Bulgarians and Greeks alike.”