Física de la tristeza

In the small and the insignificant: that is where life hides, that is where it builds its nest. Our narrator suffers from a strange syndrome: he has pathological empathy, he is able to enter the memories of others without permission. Thus, he travels from one memory to another, from a Bulgarian rural fair in 1925 —where he meets a minotaur— to the mind of a slug being devoured by its own grandfather. From this unusual material, Georgi Gospodinov constructs in *Physics of Sadness* a prodigious labyrinth where personal memory merges with collective history. Part coming-of-age story, part family chronicle, and part reflection on life in 20th-century Europe, the novel leaps from era to era and from identity to identity, tracing a map of losses, migrations, and nostalgia.