“My world was not a world of DARKNESS but one of FOG.”
The Phenomenon is a novel about a feeling most people recognise but few can name — the claustrophobia of a mind that sees its cage, but cannot find the door. About the particular experience of being awake, dissatisfied, and stuck — in an office, in a family, in a city, in your own skull. About the conversations that drain you and the silence that follows. About the moments of sudden, inexplicable clarity that appear and dissolve without explanation.
Set in Sofia during one intense week, it follows a young person navigating the machinery of modern life.
Dive into a story praised for its authentic dialogue, clever tension, and its brave, philosophical conclusion that will leave you thinking long after the last page.
It is the first book in the autobiographical trilogy Mind Against the Machine three decades, three different ages, tackling the same old unresolved argument between consciousness and the world that contains it.
Literary fiction in the tradition of Camus and Proust: honest about discomfort, uninterested in easy resolution, precise about the feelings most novels pretend don’t exist.
Sometimes it’s a bit shitty when you see something strange and puzzling, so puzzling that it feels unsettling. Nowadays, fortunately, everything has an explanation – you can find the answer to the riddle in minutes, and then continue doing what you normally do, feeling a bit smarter and more confident in yourself and the world around you. But while satisfying your curiosity, take a piece of advice from me – don’t delve too deep.
Follow your own advice.
Before we begin, let me present you with my brief biography:
In school, the teachers loved to tell me that I had highly developed logical thinking, to which I loved to respond with retorts like: “How could we measure the degree of thinking, let alone use a superlative degree without having a comparison, given that there are so many different and conflicting paradigms present, which make the existence of a unified measurement method impossible…”
Another thing you should know about my time in school is that I met Curious and Snowball there. But more on them later.
After school, I went to study at the Technical University. I almost managed to graduate. Because of that, some friends started calling me The Engineer. And the nickname stuck. Along with the characteristic way of thinking that spawned it.
I started working as a software developer about a year ago. I had no reason to complain – my salary was good, the place was also OK (at least I thought so back then), but despite that I felt like I hadn’t achieved enough on a personal level. On the contrary – I felt like my level was dropping. Sometimes it seemed to me that I was missing something very important from life. Something that it seemed everyone else knew and was hiding from me, to laugh at me behind my back. In such cases, I liked to write. I did it since I was little. In a black notebook I would jot down thoughts and ideas that came to mind. One or two sentences written in a rush. The idea was for them to be like advice to myself, like the one you see above and the ones you’ll see regularly throughout the text. My notes helped me concentrate (at least I thought so back then), and gave an opportunity for the strange ideas, which kept coming to me anyway, to be put to use.
In short, this is my story from birth to the last three days. For them, I think I’ll tell you in a bit more detail.