Marta Rebon

Updated Tuesday, March 26, 2024-00:21

They had only known each other for a few hours, and in the airport terminal they could no longer imagine being separated. He had to deliver a package for an acquaintance on the other side of the ocean, but

in the end what matters most to them is keeping the conversation alive

. Just a crush? The reader of the new installment in Spanish by

Gueorgui Gospodínov

(Yambol, 1968), which originally appeared in 2001, will ask himself. The five pages of the story

Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots

are enough for the Bulgarian author to demonstrate the possibilities and power of a story based on a realistic premise that

delves, without transitions or artifices, into the territory of the fantastic and the epistemological

.

About story theft

Georgy Gospodinov

Translation by María Vútova. Impediment 160 pages. €19.50


You can buy it here.

"Half of what is narrated here is based on things that have happened; the other half on completely invented things," says Gospodinov in a brief prologue, "which amounts to the same thing." This happy communion is precisely one of the hallmarks of his prose, which

in the stories acquires a fulminating charm, very close to orality, compared to his novels, which are more sophisticated

, cerebral and speculative.

And the connection between these two anonymous characters whose chemistry prevents them from stopping talking becomes an unexpected monument to the imagination, because,

not understanding how they did not meet before living in the same city, they decide to improvise a shared memory

to repair a past. which, if it is not common, is understood to be imperfect. "Do you remember when you and I..." they say to each other. And the intensity they put into this task is such that the memories,

initially

fictitious, end up transforming their lives.

About the theft of stories and other stories

is added to the titles already published (

Natural Novel,

Physics of Sadness

and

The Tempestalides

, the latter winner of the last Booker Prize and all published in Fulgencio Pimentel) by this original creator who dialogues with the entire European tradition - with recognizable affinities such as Borges, García Márquez, Gógol or Nabokov - and returns to us its

recurring themes: memory, time, sadness, nostalgia and the power of literature

. And he does it with the respect and ease of someone who comes from a periphery, both due to the communist past in which Gospodinov was trained and in the current European Union. These traits infuse his tone with

a compassionate and self-parodic humor, as well as a delicacy towards his characters

that his translator, María Vútova, conveys brilliantly.

The fact that Gospodinov belongs to

a generation whose entry into adulthood coincided with the end of an era explains his obsession with time

(past, present and future overlap and feed each other), both in its social and intimate dimensions. "Our personal stories are the only moves we have to prolong, even a little, a game with an announced ending," we read in

The Man of Many Names

, a story in which the familiar avatar of the author, Gaustín, appears.

Gospodinov understands his works as a Noah's ark in which

different "species" coexist in harmony, whether called absurd, fable, the dreamlike, the poetic, the everyday or the meta-literary

. In these pages we find a reflection on the human condition from the point of view of a pig while it is slaughtered, an analysis of the national character (German versus Balkan) from the drawing of some flies in public urinals with the aim of giving the Diana relieving herself, or the fantastic character of "Vaysha the Blind", whose left eye only sees towards the past, and the right, towards the future, or the story of

post-mortem

jealousy in

Living Soul

. Among the avalanche of titles coming from the publishing capitals,

Gospodinov demonstrates that good literature has no nationality and works in all languages

.