And Other Stories (Writings from an Unbound Europe)

Literary form: Short-story collection
First published: 2007
Literary period: Contemporary, post-1989 Bulgarian literature
Region / tradition: Bulgaria
Original language: Bulgarian

What happens in this work?

This is a collection of twenty-one short pieces, not one continuous novel. Its stories move among airport lounges, trains, villages, city streets, homes, and imagined fable-like worlds. The characters are often unnamed or only partly known, which makes their situations feel both particular and widely recognizable.

Gospodinov repeatedly starts with something familiar—a delayed goodbye, a public toilet, a television screen, a Christmas meal, a person with an unusual name—and then lets the situation become comic, sad, unsettling, or impossible. The collection asks readers not to separate “realistic” stories too sharply from fantastic ones; both kinds can show emotional truth.

The opening story, “Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots,” follows two strangers at an airport who have almost no time together. Rather than simply saying goodbye, they imagine the shared married life they will never get to have. Elsewhere, “The Man of Many Names” follows Gaustine, a wandering reader and performer whose borrowed identities conceal a painful lack of a story he can call his own.

Several later stories make the central concern even clearer: words, names, and stories can connect people, but they can also mislead, reduce experience, or replace direct contact. “Blind Vaysha,” for example, turns this concern into a fable about a girl who can see the past with one eye and the future with the other, but cannot fully live in the present.

The collection does not give a single final plot resolution. Instead, its cumulative effect comes from recurring patterns: missed connections, travel, memory, shifting identities, East-West misunderstandings, and narrators who doubt their own language. Read it as a mosaic: each brief story changes how the next one feels.

What was happening when it was written?

Gospodinov wrote the original Bulgarian collection, I drugi istorii, in 2001, during the decades after Bulgaria’s communist government ended in 1989. That background helps explain recurring references to scarcity, travel restrictions, the uncertain meaning of “abroad,” and the awkward adjustments of post-communist everyday life. Still, the stories are not history lessons. Political change appears through small pressures on people’s routines, fantasies, and speech. The 2007 English edition was translated by Alexis Levitin and Magdalena Levy, so English-language readers encounter Gospodinov’s work through translation as well as through its Bulgarian cultural setting.

Who matters, and why?

The unnamed man and woman in “Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots”

The pair meet because of a practical errand at an airport, yet their short wait opens into an imagined fifty-year relationship. Their importance is not biographical detail but possibility: they act out memories, illnesses, tenderness, and aging that they have not lived. The story makes a brief encounter feel emotionally larger than a lifetime.

Gaustine in “The Man of Many Names”

Gaustine is a homeless, book-saturated figure who adopts names and roles from philosophy, history, and folklore. His performances entertain others, but they also show the cost of living through borrowed language. When he is pressed for a story that is truly his, the playful tale becomes painful, linking identity to the ability to tell personal experience.

Vaysha in “Blind Vaysha”

Vaysha’s split sight makes her a fable-like figure rather than a realistic character. One eye sees only what has already happened and the other only what may happen. Her condition gives concrete form to a common human problem: memory and anxiety can become so strong that they block attention to the present.

The recurring storyteller or self-conscious narrator

Across the collection, speakers tell anecdotes, question the ownership of stories, dwell on names, or interrupt an apparently simple plot. This recurring presence matters because Gospodinov makes narration itself part of the subject. Readers are asked to notice not only what happened, but who gets to shape it into a story and why.

Big ideas to track

Storytelling as comfort and risk

People in these stories use invented or retold narratives to soften separation, boredom, shame, and historical disappointment. The airport strangers create an imagined marriage; Gaustine lives among other people’s ideas; other narrators worry about stealing or possessing stories. Storytelling can preserve feeling, but it can also expose how far words are from the life they describe.

Time, memory, and missed life

The collection frequently treats time as unstable. A few airport hours can hold an unlived future, while Vaysha is divided between past and future. These patterns make regret visible without turning every story into simple nostalgia. Gospodinov asks whether remembering what is gone or predicting what is next can prevent a person from noticing the life actually available now.

Identity and the power of names

Names are not merely labels here. Stories such as “The Man of Many Names” and “On the Taste of Names” treat names as containers for history, desire, status, and fantasy. Yet a name cannot guarantee a stable self. Gospodinov uses this tension to show why people seek clear identities while also changing roles according to place, audience, and memory.

Ordinary life under historical pressure

The collection’s political world is often indirect: awkward travel, shortages, public spaces, and misunderstandings carry the weight of larger systems. Humor is essential because it keeps the stories from becoming speeches about communism or its aftermath. The comic details reveal how political history enters private life through habits, expectations, embarrassment, and unequal access to movement.

How the writing works

Very short form and concentrated endings

Many pieces are only a few pages long, so Gospodinov cannot build meaning through long backstory. Instead, he begins with a sharply defined situation and lets one imaginative turn transform it. The endings often revise what readers thought they understood, making the stories feel like jokes with serious emotional aftereffects rather than simple puzzles.

Fable mixed with realism

A recognizable world of cafés, trains, villages, and public institutions sits beside impossible conditions, talking animals, and exaggerated coincidences. This blend allows the collection to address real loneliness and political memory without pretending realism is the only way to tell truth. The fantastic elements make hidden emotional conditions visible and memorable.

Metafiction and nested narration

The book repeatedly draws attention to telling, borrowing, naming, and arranging stories. Some pieces contain stories within stories or narrators who question their own authority. This is not just a clever game: it makes readers aware that personal and national histories always arrive through someone’s selection of details, gaps, and language.

Dark comedy and tonal shifts

Gospodinov places absurd humor next to grief, fear, and disappointment. A minor social embarrassment can become a symbol of isolation; a ridiculous performance can reveal a character’s need for recognition. The sudden shifts keep readers alert and prevent easy emotional responses. Laughter becomes a way to approach painful realities without denying them.

Moments to notice while you read

Beginning: “Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots”

What to notice: Notice how the airport setting gives the strangers a strict deadline, while their conversation and imagination seem to stretch time.

Why it matters: The story establishes a key method for the collection: a small everyday encounter becomes a space for inventing emotional truths that ordinary facts cannot provide.

Early collection: “A Second Story”

What to notice: Watch for the role of miscommunication and for the way a seemingly minor conversational problem gains emotional force through the telling.

Why it matters: This story helps readers see that language is never neutral in the collection; words can create intimacy, confusion, embarrassment, and distance at the same time.

Early collection: “Station Story”

What to notice: Pay attention to the unfamiliar public setting and the character’s practical difficulty, especially how comedy grows from discomfort and cultural difference.

Why it matters: The episode connects an individual’s embarrassment to the larger East-West tensions that hover behind the collection’s post-communist settings without turning the story into a lecture.

Early-middle collection: “The Eighth Night”

What to notice: Focus on the impossible choice involving sight and hearing, and consider why the story frames perception as a moral and emotional burden.

Why it matters: The story prepares readers for later fables by showing that exaggerated situations can test real questions about isolation, knowledge, fear, and what people are willing to lose.

Middle collection: “The Man of Many Names”

What to notice: Track Gaustine’s changing names and public performances, then notice the change in tone when he is asked for a personal story.

Why it matters: His inability to claim one settled story of his own turns a comic portrait into an argument about identity: borrowed culture may enrich a person, but it cannot fully replace lived experience.

Later collection: “The Late Gift”

What to notice: Notice the New Year’s Eve television screens and how a public image changes what the homeless man believes about his audience.

Why it matters: The story explores the deep desire to be seen and heard. Its comic premise also questions whether media attention offers real human recognition or only an illusion of it.

Later collection: “Blind Vaysha”

What to notice: Follow the contrast between Vaysha’s two eyes and ask what is missing from her way of seeing the world.

Why it matters: This fable gathers the collection’s concerns about memory, prediction, and divided identity into one powerful image. Its lesson is not to forget the past or future, but to recognize their power over the present.

Ending: “The White Pants of History”

What to notice: At the close of the book, consider how the title joins a personal, comic object to the huge and formal idea of history.

Why it matters: The final position encourages readers to rethink the whole collection: history is not only made of official events, but also of clothing, bodies, embarrassment, rumor, and the stories people repeat.

Questions to test your understanding

Answer in your own words. Then point to a specific moment in the work that supports your answer.

In “Peonies and Forget-Me-Nots,” why do the airport strangers imagine shared memories instead of simply admitting what they want from each other? What does the airport add to that choice?
How does the public “symposium” in “The Man of Many Names” change the meaning of Gaustine’s many borrowed identities?
“Station Story” uses an embarrassing practical problem. How does Gospodinov turn that problem into a comment on belonging, travel, or cultural misunderstanding?
Compare the impossible perception in “The Eighth Night” with Vaysha’s divided vision. What does each story suggest that a person loses when perception becomes incomplete?
Why does “The Late Gift” place its speaker before television screens on New Year’s Eve? How does the imagined audience affect the story he tells?
Choose one story about names and one story about memory. How does the collection show that a label or a remembered past can both help and trap a person?
Why might Gospodinov end the collection with “The White Pants of History” rather than with the fable “Blind Vaysha”? What does that arrangement imply about the relationship between grand history and ordinary life?

The K.Jung School of Standardized Review (KSSR)