The Man With Many Names by Georgi Gospodinov review – playful and profound tales from Bulgaria

This collection of 40 short stories from the International Booker winner is full of invention and warmth

In the titular story of Georgi Gospodinov’s short-story collection The Man With Many Names, the narrator reveals: “Telling our personal stories is the only move we can make … that allows us to postpone for at least a little while this game’s foregone ending.” It’s as good a description as any of the Bulgarian author’s preoccupation with stories and their power to upset life’s linear course. Like his idol Jorge Luis Borges, Gospodinov tends towards subversion in his fiction: he takes the “game” and rewrites the rules, turns the board upside down to find new ways of looking and seeing. If the ending is a foregone conclusion, Gospodinov’s magic is to make his stories feel like beginnings with endless possibilities.

The Man With Many Names comprises 40 stories made up of two collections previously published in Bulgarian. Ranging from post-Communist realism to experimental fables set in unfamiliar worlds, these magnificently imaginative pieces trade in many of the same themes – childhood, the labyrinthine qualities of language, the push and pull of fantasy and reality – as his best-known work, Time Shelter, for which he won the International Booker prize in 2023, shared with translator Angela Rodel, who also translated this collection. Here too Rodel expertly conveys Gospodinov’s economy of language, as well as his playfulness and warmth as a storyteller.

One of Gospodinov’s charming quirks is his tendency to speak directly to the reader, orienting them within the apparatus of the story. So let’s dive in, as he would say. One of the collection’s most affecting stories is Blind Vaysha (adapted into an Oscar-nominated animation by Theodore Ushev), the tale of a girl who with one eye sees into the future and with the other into the past. The trick is that Gospodinov turns Vaysha’s “blindness” into a more universal problem, as if to say we all see like Vaysha in some way.

Other standout stories in this fabular vein include The Christmas Soul of a Pig, in which a pig meditates on life, death, hypocrisy, and religion as he is prepped for slaughter; And Everything Became Moon, about a man who chooses the day of his death through a special government department; Eight Minutes and Nineteen Seconds, in which a world-renowned judge of sunsets returns to his home town to witness the apocalypse. In this story, we also bear witness to the molten core of Gospodinov’s outward morbidity; the sun has gone out, we have eight minutes to live, so what else is there to do but admire the beauty of a sunset?

Another persistent theme of the collection is love-that-cannot-be: missed connections, unfulfilled reunions. In Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots, one of the collection’s best stories, two strangers meet at an airport and fall in love. They accept they cannot be together, so invent a life of shared memories instead. After they part, the man returns home to his wife and can’t explain “what he’d been doing during those 50 years when he’d been gone” – as if their little game had bent the laws of time. Part of the pleasure of reading Gospodinov is the force of his imagination, which feels as insistently real as a child’s. This story mirrors Oh, Henry!, where two young lovers travel to each other’s home towns on Christmas Eve as a surprise, only to realise they both, tragically, had the same idea.

This twist on O Henry’s 1905 classic The Gift of the Magi is one of many literary hints that Gospodinov drops. There are stories that recall the psychological noir of Paul Auster, the literary gamesmanship of Vladimir Nabokov and the political acerbism of Milan Kundera (all three are referenced in the collection). And saturating everything he writes, the inventiveness of Borges. In the afterword, Gospodinov modestly describes “Borges and my grandmother” as his two key influences.

But Gospodinov’s world-building also has its own private logic, and in these stories we wade through the flotsam of his familiar inventory: trains (in A Second Story, A Station Story, Christine Waving from the Train and Daughter), ears and their potential dismemberment (in Forging the Bulgarian Earring, In Front of Hotel Bulgaria, and Six Degrees of Separation), the figure of the Minotaur (in The Eighth Night), cinema, Russian literature, flowers, pickles, ghosts, and dreary editorial offices. One final word must go to Gaustine, an elusive, shapeshifting character who is never far from view in Gospodinov’s works; readers may remember him as the psychiatrist in Time Shelter, and he appears in several of these stories. It is to him we are indebted for the idea above that “stories will always put off the end”, Gospodinov reveals, as well as other witty and wise interjections throughout. Hats off to Gaustine, and hats off to Gospodinov for telling us these stories while we postpone the ending.