The Story Smuggler, or how to narrate the happened and the un-happened

On 8 March, the European Studies Centre, together with Southeast European Studies at Oxford (SEESOX), hosted Bulgarian novelist, playwright, and author, Georgi Gospodinov, to discuss three of his works: The Physics of Sorrow (2011), Time Shelter (2020) and The Story Smuggler (2016). The discussion was chaired by Catherine Briddick, Andrew W Mellon Associate Professor of International Human Rights and Refugee Law and fellow of St Antony's College. Paul Betts, Professor of Modern European History and fellow at St Antony’s College, and Marilena Anastasopoulou, ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science, provided commentary on Gospodinov’s works.

Gospodinov started by reading from his two books, The Physics of Sorrow and Time Shelter, and briefly discussed the writing process. The two books deal with markedly different themes. The Physics of Sorrow attempts to capture the nature of the Bulgarian sorrow. Gospodinov describes the Bulgarian sorrow as an experience which combines the sorrow of things that did not happen, or places that Bulgarians could not visit despite the hope or longing for them, and the culture of silence, which he describes as a combination of the culture of fear during Communism and patriarchal culture. According to the author, sorrow is both personal and political, connected with the developments in one’s country.

Time Shelter, through the allegory of an Alzheimer’s clinic with rooms and floors which had encapsulated time in the decade that provided a “safe space” to each patient, explores the nature of trauma, nostalgia for a bygone area, and anxiety for the future in Europe. Gospodinov noted that memory loss inflicts not only the ability to recall events in the past but also the loss of the capacity to think about the future. This comment was made in reference to the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency. The author had started thinking about memory and nostalgia around 2014. Originally an innocent idea about exploring memory and nostalgia, the themes become more serious because of Brexit and the election of President Trump in 2016. The past, memory, and nostalgia had been weaponised. But it was an idealised version of the past combined with the anxiety of the future that had produced those two outcomes, according to Gospodinov.