Winner of the INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023
Is memory the cement of your identity? Are we in danger of a new world order facilitated by nostalgia?
Georgi Gospodinov’s wholly remarkable and enjoyable novel TIME SHELTER (translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel) has just been awarded the 2023 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE.
In this compelling novel of ideas, large concepts and fierce insights are carried on a generous tide of humour and human warmth, resulting in a memorable and thought-provoking reading experience.
When Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ to treat dementia patients by recreating previous decades in minute detail, the simulacra become so convincing that more and more healthy people seek to use the clinic as a ‘time shelter’ to escape the horrors of our present, and memory itself becomes a threat to our future.
What the judges said: “Time Shelter is a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy. It is a profound work that deals with a very contemporary question: What happens to us when our memories disappear? Georgi Gospodinov succeeds marvellously in dealing with both individual and collective destinies and it is this complex balance between the intimate and the universal that convinced and touched us.
In scenes that are burlesque as well as heartbreaking, he questions the way in which our memory is the cement of our identity and our intimate narrative. But it is also a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented, and nostalgia is a poison. It offers us a perspective on the destiny of countries like Bulgaria, which have found themselves at the heart of the ideological conflict between the West and the communist world.
It is a novel that invites reflection and vigilance as much as it moves us, because the language – sensitive and precise – manages to capture, in a Proustian vein, the extreme fragility of the past. And it mixes, in its very form, a great modernity with references to the major texts of European literature, notably through the character of Gaustine, an emanation from a world on the verge of extinction.
The translator, Angela Rodel, has succeeded brilliantly in rendering this style and language, rich in references and deeply free.
The past is only ever a story that is told. And not all storytellers have the talent of Georgi Gospodinov and Angela Rodel.”
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