Georgi Gospodinov wins Jan Michalski Prize 2016
The Jan Michalski Prize for Literature is attributed each year by the Foundation to crown a work of world literature. An original feature of the Prize is its multicultural nature. It is open to authors from the world over and is intended to contribute to their international recognition. The Prize will be awarded for works of fiction or non fiction, irrespective of the language in which it is written. The winner will receive an amount of CHF 50,000, offering the possibility of greater dedication to her or his art.
To make up the Jury, the Foundation has called on exceptional writers who are multilingual, selected for their knowledge of various literary genres, but particularly for their cultural openness.
The Physics of Sorrow stands out by it formal ingeniousness, providing a fragmented narrative made up of a multitude of stories and thoughts, echoes and leaps, of journeys in time and space but also in the Other, exploring what the human condition in a post-modern age can be, full of doubts and crises.
"I am us", states the book’s prologue: at the heart of a choral production, the storyteller is multiple, gifted with such empathy that he has the ability to enter lives other than his own. In this way he is both a small boy and his adult self in communist and post-communist Bulgaria from 1968 to 2011, he is also his grandfather as a child in 1925 and his grandfather as a soldier in World War II, he is an animal, vegetable, cloud...he is also the Minotaur, his symbolic alter ego throughout this labyrinth novel.
In the meanders of individual and collective memory, Georgi Gospodinov follows a quest for identity which is also that of a country and of Europe as a whole, because sorrow spreads, sorrow migrates.
"This is what I want to write about, this sensation of sorrow, the exhaustion of sense, which, on one hand, may be a painful feeling, but which, on the other hand, can also be a luminous feeling. A sad man is a man who thinks; a sad man is a man who contemplates. I think that when a sorrow is told it becomes more luminous".
The writer therefore collects random memories, tells tales, myths and adds small personal and family stories to greater history; adds lists, images, schemas, citations and references, that play like the brilliantly orchestrated melody of an encyclopaedia. He relates the story to ward off its obliteration by time, to try to encompass a whole, to link his "self" to other "selves" and to cement empathy for shared humanity. His guiding threads, woven with humour, spirit and poetry, follow each other delightfully in a hymn to the powers of literature.
The Physics of Sorrow opens a fascinating story chest bringing to life meanings for one’s self and others, for today and tomorrow, "something like an alternative energy source", as Georgi Gospodinov hopes.
The winner of the Jan Michalski Prize 2016 Georgi Gospodinov will receive an award of CHF 50,000.00 and a work by the Bernese artist Markus Raetz that has been chosen for him: Binocular View, 2001, a photogravure in colour.
