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.
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