Physics of Sadness - Georgi Gospodinov

"Physics of Sadness" is a novel about empathy, sadness, feelings, suffering and the consequences of our actions for those after us... And also a novel about life.

I am more and more convinced that every book by Georgi Gospodinov should be read, discussed, analyzed and, above all, felt. Because especially in this case, it was as if I wasn't reading it, but she was reading me. This is how this literature works on its readers... "I am..."

How can compassion and literally bearing and experiencing the fates and fears of others be both a gift and a cruel punishment? I admit that in the first part I got lost in all the interweaving of lives, minotaurs and explanations, but from then on the story becomes more and more clear... until finally it itself untangled me and clarified some things. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

"How are you? I don't know how I am. I cannot be definite. To answer you properly, I must spend nights, months, years, reading Babel towers of books, writing, writing... The answer is a whole novel.

How are you?

I'm not. Period."

"To sympathize with everything, to swallow snails and to be the snail itself, the eaten and that which eats him... How can he forget those brief years when he could."

"The history of a family can be told through the abandonment of a few children. The history of the world, too."

"One does not suspect how much death one is capable of producing."

"The aging of an empath is a strange and painful process. Corridors to others and their stories, once open, now find themselves walled off. Forced to be stuck in the home of one's body."

"The main question between good and evil is whether what you intend can be done by an animal. Put yourself in the shoes of your favorite animal and find out. If it would not do it, neither do you, you are entering into a mortal sin. Sin by nature. All sins have already been committed. But there remains at least this limit of the natural."