Georgi Gospodinov
Time Shelter (Vremeubežišče)
BULGARIA
BOOK
The novel explores the shape of living with no prospects for the future: a life in which time does not flow linearly but becomes part of ourselves. The main character, Gaustin, who can jump through time like across a forest stream, tries the seemingly impossible – to treat people using their pasts. To this end, he has discovered a way to create time clinics where people suffering from memory loss could return to the times in which they felt most secure. This disease, a kind of long-lasting temporal amnesia, is transformed during the course of the narrative into a disease that affects the entire society, and people become the victims of a kind of collective ‘Alzheimer’s disease. That led various countries in Europe to the idea of giving citizens the choice to vote in a referendum on which historical epoch they would like to live in.
Published by Argo, 2024
AUTHOR
© Phelia Baruh
Georgi Gospodinov (* 1968) is one of the most popular and most frequently translated contemporary Bulgarian authors. He writes poetry, prose, and drama. Three of his prose works have been translated into Czech so far. The first to be published was the collection of short stories And Other Stories (I drugi istorii) (2004), followed by two novels, Natural Novel (Estestven roman ) (2005) and, finally, in 2018, The Physics of Sorrow (Fizika na tăgata). In 2023, he won the International Booker Prize for his novel Time Shelter, which made him the first-ever Bulgarian writer to have received it. He also won the European Strega Prize 2021 for this very same text.
TRANSLATION
David Bernstein
