What did you make of its reception internationally?

I liked that the reception was very different everywhere. In France, critics wrote that the style was in line with the French literary tradition, that French authors had originated it, and they would list examples. In the UK, the consensus was that the novel’s strength was not because but despite of its postmodernist techniques, that it was the story which gripped you. The Village Voice also wrote of postmodernism as being passé. The latest translation so far is in Iceland, where it was read as a very happy, cheerful and ironic novel. There is an ironic distance that isn’t present in The Physics of Sorrow, which was widely read as being more sentimental.

There was something more personal in the place of irony.

Yes, and while these postmodernist/meta games liberated me to write Natural Novel, I wanted to step up to the challenge of surrendering ironic distance and in that respect I think The Physics of Sorrow is the braver novel. Still, even though I felt The Physics of Sorrow was closer to being a classical novel, it still felt too intimidating for many publishers, especially English-speaking ones. That idea, that you could be giving a reader something that might not be a novel, in the classical sense, seemed especially threatening.

Did you ever feel like you were writing as part of a literary lineage, or perhaps consciously against a certain national tradition in Bulgaria? One of the most striking things about both novels is their almost complete lack of precedent in Bulgarian letters.

I have a philological background and many classic Bulgarian works have been formative to me. And indeed when the novel came out, there was a nervousness about it being in conflict with the Bulgarian literary tradition. The thing is, it didn’t come from the Bulgarian prose tradition but from poetry. Beyond a stylistic break of tradition, there was an ever bigger sense of breaking away from the past after 1989. I remember spending all day in the National Library and by second year I'd already stopped going to university because 1989 happened. We were either on the street or in the library, listening to the commotion outside. I read a lot of philosophy and had an interest in ethno-methodology. Shultz, the beginning of conversations in Garfinkel, studying the factual function of language—how does a conversation start, how we speak—drew me immensely towards triviality. Bulgarian literature is more monumental, more conservative. That trivia that was part of daily life and of everyday interactions—it felt to me the whole of socialism was that, that kind of small dailyness. Conversations would go “how are you, how’re you doing,” “well what would I be doing,” “yeah, what would you be doing,” “life is ticking away, we’re growing old, the important thing is for the kids now to be fine and healthy, we’ll help with what we can”—all these constructions.

It is almost a Zen of the trivial. My irony doesn’t calcify into sarcasm. It was still an attempt to understand, to engage. In that sense, I don’t believe I’m a classical postmodernist writer either, and didn’t feel like I belonged in that tradition. There is no distancing, no satire; I was after a sense of consolation, tenderness.

I was thinking about the physicality of the language, this awareness of words as separate entities, some on the brink of extinction. Was that idea, to archive a receding language, to preserve the specific language of grandparents, idioms of a certain time, period expressions etc, a conscious effort?

The Physics of Sorrow was always meant to function as a time capsule. I write conscious of a sense of preservation, this is why one writes. In terms of language, some of it came from my grandmother, it is a pre-socialist language, almost mythological in some respect. For example, we used to keep bees and when the mother bee, the “queen bee” as it were, would separate from the hive, my grandmother would shout “mat, mat, mat” and the bee would return to the hive. Much later I learned that “mat” is in fact the Indo-European root of the word “mother.” So you talk to the bee in Indo-European. This went into a poem. I had a poem from the time, “Language’s Last Suppers,” which talks about the “language of grandfather Whitman and my grandfather/the one he’d curse the sheep with/ which they understood,” the language of “grandfather Eliot and my father,” of “grandmother Emily and grandmother Liza [Elizabeta Bagryana], and my grandmother,” these collisions and connections were always very important to me.

I read a lot of poetry at the time, from the thirties and forties, and the language of all these people around me, my grandparents and this poetry, this mixing, was always part of my writing. Like when I mention influences, it is always Borges and my grandmother, as a set, never separately. This idea of the miraculous in the daily has been close to me since childhood, since reading Andersen and spending a lot of time alone. My parents worked, so I spent many hours in different rooms, trying to make things up to pass the time, like trying to turn water into lemonade or conducting some natural-historical experiments I’d read about like putting a hair from a horse’s tail in water so it turns into a snake in forty days. There was an almost visible quality to the language, as well as the objects of that time. There was a game that went “I am I, you are you, who ate the shit, you or I?” So this engagement with language all comes from my childhood and some of it is often the language of my childhood. There was an epigraph in Natural Novel that states “Only the banal stirs my interest” and it is indeed only the transient, the mortal, that interested me. My grandmother used to say that flies’ consciousness is peoples’,” that we are not important but only eat up bread, like flies. You could go with or without us. We aren’t needed, just like flies, we are not necessary. This almost hesychastic withdrawal from the world’s importance was very significant, and in a way, it keeps you going. We’ve lived in various rented basement-level rooms, inhabiting claustrophobic spaces. These people belong to an oral culture, they are a storytelling people, and when you leave somewhere remote, it’s only through stories that you are able to connect to the rest of the world. My grandmother really did invite people to come over and talk about where they’d travelled, what they’d been doing. When the world is denied to you and you know there are very few ways of experiencing it physically, and you are not familiar with metaphysics, you end up inventing private sacred categories.

Considering how concrete and specific the language you draw from is, what has your experience with translation been? Has collaboration been important to you or is it more about a sense of trust?

Collaboration has been very important for my books, precisely because sentences matter individually. I always get worried when translators don’t ask me questions and when we don’t speak during translation. It is often in these cases that the most misbegotten errors appear. I’ve really loved the correspondence with different translators and encountering the untranslatable elements in their languages. We are still debating whether тъга is more accurately translated as sorrow or sadness. We are also rethinking the translation of the last sentence of the prologue in Physics of Sorrow: it is currently “We am” but the literal meaning is “I are,” relating to the narrator’s embodiment of other characters. It’s a question between what sounds more natural and what best conveys the meaning.

The other problem is deciding how much to explain to a “foreign” reader. My English translator, Angela Rodel, had a very good idea of adding footnotes but the publishers didn’t take to it. Though the book has many lists and word capsules as it is.

This reminds me of a long feature written by Dimitar Kenarov for the Boston Review about ten years ago, in which he calls you “the least Bulgarian writer of Bulgarian writers,” referring to your style and sensibility. Do you think there is something to that?

It is paradoxical because my subjects and stories are very specifically Bulgarian. What I am trying to do is, and what perhaps creates that impression, is to tell these specific, local stories—including historical events from the seventies and eighties—and to awaken a collective memory in a reader who doesn’t possess the local knowledge. This idea that you are talking about the melancholy of a Bulgarian child stuck in a basement room in some afternoon of 1978 and then someone in Zurich would come up to me after a reading and tell me that they’ve never been to Bulgaria or lived on the basement floor and yet it felt like the story of their childhood, with the same feeling of abandonment. These are, after all, universal categories, grown on local, specific things. This is what I tell my students, you can’t start from the universal; you have to begin on the level of detail. It was interesting that at one of my readings in Germany, a man from the audience said he expected to hear about Bulgarian-Ottoman conflicts, yataghans, massacres, the national literary stereotypes in other words. It is a problem in the national landscape.

Currently, there seems to be a renaissance of precisely the kind of historical fiction you are talking about, especially when it comes to recreating the period language of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There is Milen Ruskov’s Summit, the recovery of Georgi Bojinov’s Revival period novels . . .

Yes, there is a historical wave but perhaps I have a more unliterary interpretation of it. By that I mean that writers often sense and anticipate readers’ tastes, or they don’t consciously but match them by coincidence. I don’t count Bojinov in this of course as he wrote is novels in the eighties but refer mostly to Milen Ruskov and the other prominent historical fiction writer Vladimir Zarev, for example. A few books have gathered a lot of attention but there is speculation regarding some aspects of the genre’s popularity. One explanation is the classical Bulgarian reader of my parents’ generation having grown up with historical novels—Anton Donchev’s Time of Parting, Vera Mutafchieva’s books etc.—and their contemporary incarnations are sometimes partly a nostalgia wave for that time, and for mending the fractured national identity of the present. These novels tell you of a past grandeur, of haidouks and heroes, as a confirmation of a greatness that is now lost. Not knowing who we are now, versus knowing we were once great.

I think this is related to a wider concern, to a sense that there is a deficiency when it comes to a future, the reaction to which is this desire to look back. What worries me is that this quickly shades into nationalism in some other writers. There are several novels that have come out recently, I won’t name them, which elevate the Bulgarian as a sacred category; there is a novel, which tells how Roma people rob and pillage Bulgarian villages and a Bulgarian hero rouses the nation against them. It is all speculation. I remember when editing the anthology I Lived Socialism, comprised of individuals’ private recollections of the Socialist era, it was met with an automatic dismissal. Critics were asking whether this was the right time to talk about socialism while a political scientist had written that “We shouldn’t leave socialism to be narrated by those who lived it.” They were too partial, time needed to pass, some distance to be achieved, so that it might be described coldly and neutrally, which of course goes entirely against my understanding as a writer. What is missing are precisely the personal, private stories of these people.

This reminds of me of your critique of the Museum of Totalitarian Art in Sofia when it opened in 2011, I remember you criticizing the ahistorical presentation and curation of objects.

It is terrible. Again, together with some friends we were thinking of making something like a Museum of State Security, which was naïve of course, because these things are blocked from a high level, and at root. But we had put together a lot of plans, I have about a fifty-page concept for it. This was when I was in the Swiss monastery. I wasted some time, created this presentation, we found architects, we found the place. The idea actually came from the head of the National archive at the time. Underneath it, in the basements, on 5 Moskovska Street, was where, in the sixties, various young people were taken in for disrupting order—whether for narrow trousers or for other Western-like clothing—and were then sent off to the Belene work camp. He wanted to see it happen but when the Oresharski government came into power, everything collapsed of course [when he appointed the media mogul Delyan Peevski to head the Department of National Security, sparking the mass protests of 2013]. The problem wasn’t only caused by that government or the previous one. There just isn’t enough of a collective will for something of that scale. The push back is too strong.

There is a sense in Bulgaria that certain structures from before 1989 have remained and still remain intact, which is something not widely talked about.

Yes, on one hand intact, on the other, they are entering the public sphere in new ways through new media, through Facebook and internet trolls . . . I felt it particularly over the past three years, especially because I’ve always had a position on this, it’s always been clear where I stand. I never took any part in party politics but I was columnist for Dnevnik [a leading national newspaper] for 10 years, so I wrote what I thought every week. In 2013 after Oresharski’s government came into power, I gave a speech in front of the National Library that ended up resonating widely, as well as being misinterpreted widely. It was about the political kitsch that was dominating the public sphere and how only the reading person could offer an adequate resistance, that it was a political question to have and develop a taste that cuts against this political kitsch. It has one line that said “the reading person is beautiful” because he can’t be as easily corrupted, predominantly on aesthetic grounds. There was a backlash and a fixation on me as an opinion leader as this slogan about the “beautiful” protester got appropriated as ammunition against the movement. As in, if I am calling them beautiful, it must mean I’m saying that the non-protesters are ugly, that kind of thing. These rhetorical wars of course become part of the literary ones.