Lifestyle
Prize-winning Bulgarian writer brings 'The Physics of Sorrow' to U.S. readers
Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov won the 2023 International Booker Prize for his book, Time Shelter. An English version of The Physics of Sorrow, an earlier novel, has just been published in the United States.
Toward the end of this brilliant book, Gospodinov considers the concept of “weight” in physics. He writes, “The past, sorrow, literature — only these three weightless whales interest me.” This complex sentence provides a summation of Gospodinov’s fascinating literary explorations.
Elegantly translated by Angela Rodel, The Physics of Sorrow is a fragmented novel that coheres into a remarkable, thought-provoking whole. It is a winding labyrinth through Bulgarian communism, art, literature, history, the personal past, love, sorrow, and so much more.
In epigraphs, Gospodinov invokes Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, members of the tradition in which Gospodinov writes. At the same time, he quotes St. Augustine, Gustave Flaubert, and his own fictional character Gaustine, signaling to readers not to take anything too seriously, but also to consider the weight of each word.
Gospodinov frames his novel around the myth of the Minotaur, a monster with a bull’s head and a man’s body, captive in an underground Labyrinth on Crete. There are multiple variations of the myth, and multiple explanations of how the Minotaur came into being. Gospodinov parses through many of them, like a gourmet cook selecting produce. He considers how aspects of this myth are imprinted on modernity — man behaving as beast and society “othering” those who are different.
Gospodinov’s narration is fluid. Sometimes he writes in first person, sometimes a boy/man named Georgi (like the author) narrates, sometimes the narration is in third person. We get insights into Gospodinov’s reading and writing life. “At five I learned to read, by six it was already an illness … literary bulimia.” He leaves a blank space on a page, saying it was written with invisible fruit ink. “What, so you don’t see anything? …If only I could write a whole novel in such ink.”
If there is a plot, it is composed of the arcs of several lives, including a person like the author himself and a person who may be like his grandfather. We get characters’ memories from World War I, and World War II, which could be Gospodinov’s own family stories.
The Physics of Sorrow, however, is not a novel to read for plot. It is a book that raises vexing questions about the human condition, and travels down labyrinthine digressions about topics that consume us — life, death, social woes, war, peace, old age, youth. And perhaps the creation of literature, above all.
For Gospodinov, time is an artifice. Present, past, and future slide around like pieces on a chessboard. A section called “The Chiffonier of Memory,” exemplifies Gospodinov’s technique. Here, the narrator — perhaps the author — is a journalist writing about Bulgarian WWII cemeteries. He travels through Serbia on the roads his grandfather “trudged on foot through the mud in the winter of 1944,” before stopping in Harkány, Hungary to interview a man who lives in a house where his grandfather was billeted during the war.
The man comments on his mother, an old woman present at the interview, as an occasion to explore memory: “Her memory is a chiffonier, I can sense her opening the long locked-up drawers … she has to wade through more than fifty years, after all.”
The man is ill at ease with his mother’s silence. He asks her something. “She turns her head slightly, without taking her eyes off me [the narrator]. It could pass as a tick, a negative response, or part of her own internal monologue.” The man notes that since his mother had a stroke, her memory is not all there.
But the narrator is having a different experience. He ignores his interviewee’s comments, certain that the woman recognizes him because he looks just like his grandfather.
The narrator jumps through time to describe how beautiful this woman was as a young woman, and how much his grandfather loved her. Even though the narrator was not there, he describes what she looked like and what she wore, projecting his grandfather’s love affair — which may or may not have happened — as his own.
Even though the narrator and the old woman have “no language in which we can share everything,” her eyes say in “impeccable Bulgarian: hello, thank you, bread, wine … I continue in Hungarian: szép (beautiful) … as if passing a secret message from my dead grandfather.”
Who has actually experienced this love affair and who is the narrator? The passage may read as linear story, until the reader stops to consider the enormous gap between the time of the interview and the time of the love affair.
The book purports to be about sorrow, and it is. Sorrow laces through life in many guises — grief, abandonment, regret, guilt. For this reader, Gospodinov’s multi-faceted considerations of human (and mythical) sorrow are reason enough to read the book.
At one point, Gospodinov writes that he aspires to “keep a precise catalogue of everything.” It feels like he has nearly succeeded with this innovative, captivating novel.
Martha Anne Toll is a DC based writer and reviewer. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Her second novel, Duet for One, is due out May 2025.
Millie Bobby Brown in the final season of Stranger Things.
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Netflix
After five seasons and almost ten years, the saga of Netflix’s Stranger Things has reached its end. In a two-hour finale, we found out what happened to our heroes (including Millie Bobby Brown and Finn Wolfhard) when they set out to battle the forces of evil. The final season had new faces and new revelations, along with moments of friendship and conflict among the folks we’ve known and loved since the night Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) first disappeared. But did it stick the landing?
To access bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening for Pop Culture Happy Hour, subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy.
JasonMartin
Adin Ross Disrespecting Doechii …
Will Not Be Tolerated!!!
Published
TMZ.com
JasonMartin is putting his foot down after hearing Adin Ross call Doechii a “bitch” one too many times … the culture’s not going for it in 2026!!!
TMZ Hip Hop caught up with JM in L.A. this week, and he says Adin being aggressively addressed is vital to preventing outsiders of Black culture from toeing the line in the future.
Adin Ross is lying about Doechii and one of the biggest Twitter Accounts is behind it… pic.twitter.com/VoAwGJefyV
— Mike Tee (@ItsMikeTee) January 5, 2026
@ItsMikeTee
Adin maintains Doechii targeted him on her new track, “Girl, Get Up,” when she blasted people labeling her “an industry plant” … and blamed Complex magazine for helping fuel the fire.
Joe Budden, Glasses Malone, Wack 100, and Top Dawg Entertainment execs have all chimed in on Adin’s comments, and Jason says it’s bigger than internet tough talk … and won’t allow Adin to hide behind religion or freedom of speech to drag Black women.
Adin went on to collaborate with Tekashi 6ix9ine and Cuff Em on an anti-Lil Tjay and Doechii song, but has since said he’ll stay out of the beef; his chat doesn’t matter to him, and it’s not that deep to him.
TMZ.com
War mongering isn’t Jason’s only goal this year. He released 5 albums — “A Hit Dog Gon Holla,“ “I Told You So,“ “Mafia Cafe,“ “O.T.,“ and “A Lonely Winter” — to close out the 4th quarter and just may be in the “Snowfall” reboot with his buddy, Buddy!!!
A firefighter works as homes burn during the Eaton fire in the Altadena area of Los Angeles County, Calif., on Jan. 7, 2025.
Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
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Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
On New Year’s Eve 2024, journalist Jacob Soboroff was sitting around a campfire with a friend when he made an offhand comment that would come back to haunt him: The last thing he wanted to do in the new year, Soboroff said, was cover a story that would require donning a fire-safe yellow suit.
Just one week later, Soboroff was dressed in the yellow suit, reporting live from a street corner in Los Angeles as fire tore through the Pacific Palisades, the community where he was raised.
“This was a place that I could navigate with my eyes closed,” Soboroff says of the neighborhood. “Every hallmark of my childhood I was watching carbonize in front of me. … There were firefighters there and first responders and other journalists there, but it was an extremely lonely, isolating experience to be standing there as everything I knew burned down around me in real time.”
In his new book, Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster, Soboroff offers a minute-by-minute account of the catastrophe, told through the voices of firefighters, evacuees, scientists and political leaders. He says covering the wildfires was the most important assignment he’s ever undertaken.
“The experience of doing this is something that I don’t wish on anybody, but in a way I wish everybody could experience,” he says. “It’s given me insane reverence for our colleagues in the local news community here, who, I think, definitionally were exercising a public service in the street-level journalism that they were doing and are still doing. … It was actually beautiful to watch because they are as much a first responder on a frontline as anybody else.”
Interview highlights
On the experience of reporting from the fires
You’re choking with the smoke. And I almost feel guilty describing it from my vantage point because the firefighters would say things to me like: “My eyeballs were burning. We were laying flat on our stomach in the middle of the concrete street because it was so hot, it was the only way that we could open the hoses full bore and try to save anything that we could.” …
I could feel the heat on the back of my neck as we stood in front of these houses that I remember as the houses that cars and people would line up in front of for the annual Fourth of July parade or the road race that we would run through town. Trees were on fire behind us — we were at risk of structures falling at any given minute. It was pretty surreal because this is a place I had spent so much time as a child and going back to as an adult. … I had no choice but to just open my mouth and say what I saw to the millions of people that were watching us around the country.
On undocumented immigrants being central to rebuilding the city
These types of massive both humanitarian and natural disasters give us X-ray vision for a time into sort of the fissures that are underneath the surface in our society. And Los Angeles, in addition to being one of the most unequal cities between the rich and the poor, has more undocumented people than virtually any other city in the United States of America. Governor Newsom knew that with the policies of the incoming administration, some of the very people that would be responsible for the cleanup and the rebuilding of Los Angeles may end up in the crosshairs of national immigration policy. And I think that that was an understatement. …
Pablo Alvarado in the National Day Laborer Organizing Network said to me that often the first people into a disaster — the second responders after the first — are the day laborers. They went to Florida after Hurricane Andrew, to New Orleans after Katrina, and they’d be ready to go in Los Angeles. And I went out and I cleaned up Altadena and Pasadena with some of them in real time.
And only months later did this wide-scale immigration enforcement campaign begin … on the streets of LA as sort of the Petri dish, the guinea pig for expanding this across the country. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that the parking lots of Home Depots, where workers [were] looking to get involved in the rebuilding of Los Angeles, has been ground zero for that enforcement campaign.
On efforts to rebuild
The pace is slow and it’s sort of a hopscotch of development. And I think for people who do come back, for people who can afford to come back, it’s going to be a long road ahead. You’re going to have half the houses on your street under construction for years to come. And for people that do inhabit those homes, it’s going to an isolating experience. But there’s an effort underway to rebuild. …
There’s also a lot of for-sale signs. And that’s the sad reality of this, is that there are people who, whether it’s that they can’t afford to come back … or that they just can’t stomach it, I think, sadly, a lot people are not going to be returning to their homes.
On what the Palisades and Altadena look like today
They both look like very big construction sites in a way. There are still some facades, some ruins of the more historic buildings in the Palisades. … But mostly it’s just empty lots. And in Altadena, the same thing. If you drive by the hardware store, the outside is still there. But it’s a patchwork of empty lots. Homes now under construction. And lots and lots of workers. … There are still a handful of people who are living in both the Palisades and in Altadena, but for the most part, these are communities where you’ve got workers going in during the day and coming out at night. …
We have designed this community to be one that’s in the crosshairs of a fire just like the one we experienced and that we will certainly, certainly experience again, because nobody’s packing it up and leaving Los Angeles. People may not return to their communities after they’ve lost their homes, but the ship has sailed on living in the wildland urban interface in the second largest city in the country.
On seeing this story, personally, as his “most important assignment”
Jacob Soboroff is a correspondent for MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.
Jason Frank Rothenberg/HarperCollins
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Jason Frank Rothenberg/HarperCollins
I don’t think I realized at the time how badly I needed the connections that I made in the wake of the fire, both with the people who have lost homes and the firefighters, first responders who were out there, but also honestly with my own family, my immediate family, my wife and my kids, my mom and my dad and my siblings and myself. I think that this was a really hard year in LA, and I think in the wake of the fire, I was experiencing some level of despair as well. Then the ICE raids happened here and sort of turned our city upside down. And this book for me was just this amazing cathartic blessing of an opportunity to find community with people I don’t think I ever would have otherwise spent time with, and to reconnect with people who I hadn’t seen or heard from in forever.
Anna Bauman and Nico Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.
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