Winning the International Booker Prize has brought your work to a much wider audience. How do you think the central messages of Time Shelter have been received and understood?
I think the messages have been heard, at least some of them – those related to turning the past into propaganda. The pandemic of the past, the deficit of future, the weaponisation of nostalgia and the loss of reflective memory are part of the world we live in today. And the readers I meet are concerned about this time warp.
Since winning the International Booker, do you feel a responsibility to represent or promote Bulgarian literature more generally?
It happens naturally. My previous books, like Natural Novel and especially The Physics of Sorrow, were also part of this path, and after the Booker the path became wider. And the next Bulgarian writers will have it a little easier. We are already seeing that.
In Time Shelter you highlight the dangers of mixing false nostalgia and politics – what prompted your concern?
Nostalgia is a normal human feeling, although it was once considered a disease, a diagnosis. I wouldn’t want anyone to use nostalgia as a bait, as a trap to bring whole societies back to the past. The past is not a good place to live in. It can only be visited briefly. And the dealers of the past roam among us.
In Time Shelter, each European country has a referendum to choose a decade in the past to which it will return. You decided that Ireland would choose 1990 – why?
It is not easy to predict other countries’ nostalgias. But I have to say that nostalgia for the 1990s is one of the brightest on my scale.
Do you consider yourself a Bulgarian writer, a European writer, an experimental writer? Which adjective are you most comfortable with?
Just a writer.
In your memoir, The Story Smuggler, you say that your grandmother was an important influence. What sort of stories did she tell you when you were young?
In her stories, the everyday and the magical went hand in hand. And one naturally turned into the other. For example, she would say that the neighbour was born with wings under his arms, and my brother and I would secretly peek through his windows to see those wings when he took off his shirt at night. This tradition of oral storytelling I think has influenced my writing as well.
You grew up in Yambol, not far from Turkey. What was it like?
Warm, eastern parts with endlessly bleeding sunsets. All this experience is in my books, especially in my novel The Physics of Sorrow. It was a childhood during communism, far from the centre, with a subtle sense of abandonment.
The Physics of Sorrow explores the theme of abandonment – is that something you have ever felt personally?
The children of my generation were somewhat left to their own devices. Our parents were young; they worked all day. We spent the afternoons alone at home, on the street, or with the grandparents in the village. Sometimes I felt like a minotaur in the dark room on the ground floor where we lived. But perhaps it was this loneliness that drove me to write.
In The Physics of Sorrow, you write sympathetically about the mythological minotaur – as a victim rather than a monster. Is it important to you as a writer to search for empathy with your characters?
If one has empathy, one will always be able to see even in a monster like the Minotaur an abandoned child locked in a maze. We often tend to turn into monsters those whom we ourselves have hurt or traumatised.
You’ve also written poems, librettos, a graphic novel, screenplays. How have those other forms influenced you as a novelist?
My experience with poetry remains most important to me. I think that it gives the most important lessons in writing – intensity of emotion and thought, lightning-fast connections between things, and courage approaching the secret core of things.
It is more than 30 years since the fall of the Soviet empire. How reintegrated do you think Bulgaria and the rest of the former Soviet bloc is in Europe?
We have learned very slowly and very painfully that democracy is not a one-way road. It is not given for free once and for all, as we naively thought. The West also naively thought this way. It seems to me that all the countries in Europe now have a similar problem of integration to a very different time.
Have any Irish writers influenced you?
Joyce, of course, is always the first one you get lost in. He’s a monster. I remember saying to myself, after wrestling with Ulysses, ‘So it’s possible to write like this, with so many meanders, corridors, canyons and erudition.’ My novels love the ramifications, too. I like Beckett, Colm Tóibín. You have great authors.
Which projects are you working on?
I finished a very special personal book, Death and the Gardener, which was recently published in Bulgarian. And I’m still slowly coming out of it.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
Yes, to the grave of Joyce in Zurich, the one of Thomas Mann, of Borges in Geneva, to the Embankment of the Incurables in Venice because of Brodsky, Lisbon because of Pessoa, and so on. In fact, all my favourite cities were invented by favourite writers.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
When I started writing, I didn’t know any writers. Then it was too late for advice.
Who do you admire the most?
Different authors through the years. I have stayed with Borges and all the poets the longest.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
Do not harm.
Which current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
I’m currently reading Benjamin Labatut’s Booker-nominated novel, When We Cease to Understand the World. I love books like that, which know how to make science into literature and generally push the boundaries.
Which public event affected you most?
The wars today.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
Iceland.
Your most treasured possession?
My daughter’s drawings in my notebooks.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
Some old children’s books from my time and a botany atlas.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
I guess my favourite writers would be silent and bored at parties like this. But I’d try Borges, Bolaño and the poet Laura Gilpin, for example, who only had one book and disappeared.
The best and worst things about where you live?
A place full of stories: good for storytelling and hard for living.
What is your favourite quotation?
“Nothing to fear,” my father’s words as I held his hand before he passed away.
Who is your favourite fictional character?
In my books, Gaustin, who I invented 30 years ago and now he claims he invented me. In world literature, Scheherazade.
A book to make me laugh?
The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hasek.
A book that might move me to tears?
Any good book.
Georgi Gospodinov will be in conversation with Rónán Hession at MoLI in Dublin on Sunday, December 1st
