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“Time Shelter,” the novel whose wave of nostalgia swept Europe and all countries that considered living in the past, on Tuesday won the Booker International Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for fiction translated into English.
Georgi Gospodinov, the book’s Bulgarian author, will share a prize of 50,000 British pounds, worth about $62,000, with Angela Rodel, who translated the novel into English. He received the award at a ceremony in London.
A complex novel, “Time Shelter” focuses on a psychiatrist who sets up a clinic in Switzerland to help people with Alzheimer’s disease. The clinic includes a space that recreates the past in intricate detail to help patients remember, and the experiment was so successful that the idea was carried far beyond the walls of the hospital.
Leïla Slimani, a French-Moroccan writer and chair of the judging panel, said at a press conference that “Time Shelter” is “a wonderful novel, full of irony and melancholy.” It contained “heartbreaking” scenes that made judges question “how our memory is the cement of our identity,” he added, but the book was also “a beautiful novel about Europe, a continent that needs a future, the past is reinvented and nostalgia is poison.”
Reviewers have highlighted the political charge at the heart of the novel. Adrian Nathan West, in a review for The New York Times Book Review, said that when reading “Time Shelter” it was impossible “not to think of the reactionary sentiments behind Brexit and MAGA and even the irredentism of Putin’s Great Russia.”
But Gospodinov was “too soft to resort to harsh political satire,” West wrote. “They believe the flights of the past will not negate the current conflict.”
The International Booker Prize differs from the more well-known Booker Prize, which is awarded to novels originally written in English, but carries the same prize money.
Gospodinov, 55, is the first Bulgarian to win the award. “Time Shelter,” her third novel to be translated into English, beat out five other books shortlisted for the prize, including Maryse Condé’s “The Gospel According to the New World,” translated from French by Richard Philcox, about a child who left in Martinique where he grew up to be a Christ-like figure.
Slimani said in a press conference that the judges took three hours to choose the winner but “there was no argument or bloody argument.”
Gospodinov, who was born in the small town of Yambol, in 1968, is one of the most successful writers in his country. He was a poet before turning to fiction, and his first novel, “Nature Novel”, was published in 1999. Author Garth Greenwell, writing in The New Yorker in 2015, said that the book “pushed him to the front of his generation. The Bulgarian author, who first emerged after the country’s transition to democracy.
Before the prize was announced, Rodel said “the country will have a collective orgasm if it wins.”
Some of Gospodinov’s works take inspiration from Bulgarian society and politics or perceptions outside of Eastern Europe. His novel “The Physics of Sorrow” follows the protagonist in the world’s saddest country – inspired by Western clichés about the temperament of Eastern Europeans.
In a recent interview in connection with the International Booker Prize, Gospodinov said that “The Place of Time” looks beyond the borders of his country and is inspired by the global shift towards populism. “I came from a system that sold a ‘bright future’ under communism,” he said. “Now the stocks have moved, and the populists are selling the ‘bright past.’
“I know through my own skin that both checks bounce,” added Gospodinov. “He is not supported by anything.”
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