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"The man who herded us into the tent (his master and guardian) begins his tale. An odd mix of legend and biography, honed over the course of long repetition at fairs. A story in which eras catch up with one another and intertwine. Some events happen now, other in the distant and immemorial past. The places are also confused, palaces and basements, Cretan kings and local shepherds build the labyrinth of this story about the Minotaur-boy, until you get lost in it. It winds like a maze and unfortunately I will never be able to retrace its steps. A story with dead-end corridors, threads that snap, blind spots and obvious discrepancies."

The narrator of Gospodinov's Physics of Sorrow (who bears a close resemblance to the author) suffers as a child from "pathological empathy or obsessive empathetic-somatic syndrome�, as a doctor diagnoses it. In practice, this means that he is able to enter into other people's stories and experience them directly - and the novel opens with him (as a young child in the 1970s) reliving a country fair from 1925 attended by his Grandfather. Unlike his Grandfather, who spends his money visiting a conjurer, the narrator/Grandfather goes to see a circus freak, a boy-bull hybrid, whose master claims to be the legendary Minotaur of Crete.

And the story of the Minotaur - who the narrator believes to have been cruelly miscast as a monster rather than a frightened child - provides both a focal point for the novel and, via the labyrinth in which he was imprisoned, a guideline for Gospodinov's narrative style:

"Alas, the story is linear and you have to get rid of the detours, wall up the side corridors. The classical narrative is an annulling of the possibilities than rain down on you from all sides...I try to leave space for other versions to happen, cavities in the story, more corridors, voices and rooms, unclosed-off stories, as well as secrets that we will not pry into... And there where the story's sin was not avoided, hopefully uncertainty was with us."

Another recurrent motif is the tale of 1001 Nights, indeed the novel points out a key link: "Almost no one remembers or pays attention to how One Thousand and One Nights begins. In the exact same way as the myth of the Minotaur starts. With an infidelity."

This is no conventional novel; as promised Gospodinov takes us on many digressions and sidetracks. The novel starts with the young narrator entering into and retelling other people's stories. Indeed a prologue sets out some brief examples; "I was born at the end of August 1913 as a human being of the male sex. I don't know the exact date. They waited a few days to see if I would survive and then put me down in the registry", "I haven't been born yet. I am forthcoming. I am minus seven months old", "I remember being born as a rose bush, a partridge, a gingko biloba, a snail, a cloud in June (that memory is brief)" and concludes "we am", and the epilogue of the parallel experienced deaths concludes "we was".

But as he ages the narrator loses this power (or is cured of his "empathetic-somatic syndrome") and instead he becomes a collector of other people's stories and finally of objects.

"THINGS UNSUITED TO COLLECTING
(A LIST OF THE PERISHABLE)

Cheeses - start to stink
Apples - shrivel up and rot
Clouds - constantly change their states of aggregation
Quince jam - gets mouldy on top
Lovers - get old, shrivelled up (see apples)
Children - grow up
Snowmen - melt
Tadpoles and silk worms - anatomically unstable

If we draw the line, it turns out that nothing organic is suitable for collecting. A world with a permanently expiring expiration date. A perishable, shrivelling, rotting, deteriorating (and thus) wonderful world."

Indeed the narrator argues for that we should value most "that which is fleeting, changeable, transitory but alive", arguing that "the enduring, the constant, the eternal" is cause of most of our problems e.g. wars:

"No one lays siege to a city for its fragrant, blossoming cherry trees. By the time the siege is over, the cherry trees will have lost their blossoms"

The narrator also treats us to lengthy - and entertaining - digressions on subjects such as the mania in the 2nd half of the 20th Century for time capsules, quantum physics and "the physics of sorrow", an amusing riff on the difficulties of answering the question "how are you?", particularly in a totalitarian society, and compendium of European hotel rooms ("he would keep tabs on his body in hotel mirrors, that's precisely where old age would be waiting to ambush him". And although the aim of hotel owners is to eliminate all organic traces of the previous occupants, one can still discern in old hotel rooms "the bodies of everyone who has lain there for the past 200 years, thin, translucent, as negatives.")

Throughout the image of the Minotaur provides our Ariadne's thread, avoiding us getting lost, as well as the central themes of story-telling, language and ageing.

"There is some sort of grammar of ageing. Childhood and youth are full of verbs. You can't sit still. Everything in you is growing, gushing forth, developing. Later the verbs are gradually replaced by the nouns of middle age. Kids, cars, work, family - the substantial things of the substantives. Growing old is an adjective. We enter into the adjectives of old age - slow, boundless, hazy, cold, or transparent like glass."

The novel was translated into English by Angela Rodel, who copes admirably with what must have been it's many. challenges.

At it's best, the novel reminded me of Kundera at his most playful, with it's subheading and philosophical but humorous musings on many topics, complete with sub-headings.

However, if the novel is flawed, it is by comparison to Kundera, or indeed Gospodinov's own model, the Minotaur's labyrinth. Kundera's novels were famously intricately constructed, nary a word out of place, and so to was the labyrinth containing the Minotaur, the work of the master Daedalus. In contrast, at times it feels as if, in the Physics of Sorrow, Gospodinov has simply included anything of relevance (and sometimes irrelevance) that occurs to him, and the novel also wavers between autobiographical fictions and literary philosophy (and typically strongest when the latter).

Overall - flawed but an excellent read.

For a review that does the novel more justice than I possibly can I would recommend: