Georgy Gospodinov: “Jorge Luis Borges gave me a joyful sense of freedom” | books

My first memory is reading
I learned to read very early, at five or six, perhaps so I could sit quietly and not be a bother to the adults. And it worked. Once I got into a book, I didn’t want to get out. I remember how the novel “The Little Match Girl” by Hans Christian Andersen turned my heart upside down. I was living with my grandmother at the time, and I cried under the blanket, terrified that one day she would die, too.

My favorite book growing up
I was reading voraciously and randomly, choosing books at random from my father’s library. Thomas Mayne Read’s adventure novels were a favourite, especially The Headless Horseman. Jack London Martin Eden too. I obviously liked the idea of ​​being a hero and a writer. Writers were not usually heroes. I also loved a textbook on criminology, which explains how invisible ink is made, the traces criminals leave behind, and so on – matters of extraordinary interest to any ten-year-old boy.

the author This changed me as a teenager
All novels contain erotic scenes – due to the severe lack of eroticism in late socialist Bulgaria in the 1980s. It was also around this time that I discovered J.D. Salinger. I re-read his stories obsessively, without being sure that I understood everything. When I was seventeen, I decided to write him a letter, trying to provoke him into breaking his silence. Of course, I never sent it. Before long, that story found its way into my memoir, The Story Smuggler.

The writer who changed my mind
Jorge Luis Borges. When the first translations of his works appeared in Bulgaria, I was twenty-one years old, shortly before the fall of the Wall – a crucial moment. It was as if I suddenly understood what literature could do, and how there were no real boundaries between genres. I had an exhilarating feeling of freedom, but also of a shared secret. Memory, erudition, heart, lore, legend – it was all there.

The book that made me want to be a writer
Poems of two Bulgarian tragic poets: Pio Yavorov and Nikola Vaptsarov. I started writing poetry secretly. Later, I was discovered.

The book I re-read
Homer’s Odyssey. We might have mentioned it or read parts of it in school, and maybe that’s what put me off it for so long. After I turned 40, I started to really understand it – and reread it, seeing it differently each time. I was increasingly attracted to the theme of the father, the bond between father and son. Then there is the great theme of return – not just a return home, but also to the past – and memory, and the question of who remembers us unconditionally and recognizes us, like a dog. In my last two novels I have been in dialogue with this book over and over again.

The book I discovered later in life
Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain. It always stood out on my bookshelf, but for years I never had access to it. I imagined it would be very dark, heavy, and full of endless musings. When I read it in my late 40s, it wasn’t love at first sight, but the story didn’t let me go. I like books where I can talk to her, even have Socratic arguments with her. It was very important to me while writing Time Shelter. You think you are writing in isolation, but in fact you are in constant dialogue with other books and authors.

The book I’m currently reading
Jacob Books by Olga Tokarczuk. A powerful novel that, like Borges’s maps, seems to try to contain the world – and time – at a 1:1 scale. A book for slow reading in winter.