Natural Novel

Back Cover Text (From the Promotional Bulletin)

What wouldn’t we expect to see mentioned in a novel? Toilets, for example. Flies. The ways plants reproduce. The ordinary details of daily life. Although these are “natural” things, they are generally considered too irrelevant or unimportant to be included in novels. Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, on the other hand, has embraced all these marginalized subjects and created a “mischievous” novel: “A multifaceted novel reminiscent of a fly’s gaze. And like it, a novel full of details, tiny things invisible to the ordinary eye.”

The story begins with a divorce: The narrator, a writer, leaves his wife and leaves his old life, along with his seemingly rational self, behind. As our hero becomes increasingly isolated from the outside world, we are drawn into the winding corridors of his inner world. As one would expect from a “natural” novel, the narrative does not progress linearly but in zigzags and fragments; the interlocking fictional layers sometimes wink at reality.

“A book about the impossibility of telling our own lives,” Gospodinov says of Doğal Roman – but, as a creative writer would, he manages to discover and use the possibilities within this impossibility.