Physics of sadness

Five years ago, the British magazine "The Economist" published an investigation about "The Geography of Happiness," and according to it, Bulgaria was one of the most miserable countries in the world. After nearly a year, the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov responded to that investigation by writing his novel "The Physics of Sadness," in which he talks about his sad homeland, his personal torments, and his longing for dreams that will never come true, sometimes for personal reasons, and other times due to political and economic circumstances. Georgi Gospodinov is one of the most important literary names in the current Bulgarian scene. He was born in Yanbol in 1968, and has many books in poetry, short stories, and novels, some of which have been translated into more than ten foreign languages. His novel "The Physics of Sadness" was published by "Janet 45" in Sofia in 2012, and on the day of its release, all copies of the first edition were sold out, making it the best-selling book of that year, and it received many literary awards. The novel has a special taste that stimulates the reader's appetite, despite its length of 340 pages of medium size. It does not rely on conventional plot or traditional narration style, but belongs to the stream of consciousness, based on the technique of free association and scene-cutting, as the writer places fragments of his memory in brief poetic sentences and short paragraphs, forming a dense, sprawling scene, very concise, with its own independent title, separated from others by its self-contained subject, and connected with the rest of the scenes through the overall narrative atmosphere and the way of playing with words.