This volume comes from the best story of the Booker International Prize-winning writer, Georgi Gospodinov, who collected it over three decades.
The Man with Many Names shows a world-famous author at his most playful and profound, embodying the oddities of existence through forty stories set in and around beloved Bulgaria, in and around this vanishing world.On a train that roams the Balkan plains full of poppy blossoms, strangers spend their time exchanging stories, but their conversations are quickly lost due to different translations. On a cold New Year's Eve, a lonely man thinks he's on TV, and that his every move is in the sights of millions.A girl born with two different eyes - one seeing only the past, the other seeing only the future - strives to achieve the impossible. A father spreads the laundry between two cherry trees, triggering a series of absurd and historical events. What can we do in the last minutes of a dying sun? How will we recognize the faces of the last days? Between these pages wanders someone named Gustin, a scammer familiar to longtime Gospodinov fans.The Man with Many Names resonates powerfully across time and space, preserving its deep understanding of the nature of human communication, and how one person's gesture can radically change another's life as if it were fate. This novel, brilliantly translated by Angela Rodel, is another creative addition from “one of the indispensable writers of our time” (Booker International Prize jury).
