‘Time Shelter’ wins International Booker Prize
“Time Shelter,” a novel in which a wave of nostalgia sweeps across Europe and entire countries contemplating living in past eras, won the International Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for fiction translated into English, on Tuesday.
Georgi Gospodinov, the Bulgarian author of the book, will share the £50,000 prize, worth approximately $62,000, with Angela Rodel, who translated the novel into English. They received the award at a ceremony in London.
A complex novel, “Time Shelter”, is about a psychiatrist who sets up a clinic in Switzerland to help people with Alzheimer’s disease. The clinic includes rooms that recreate times gone by in minute detail to help patients preserve their memories, and the experiment proves so successful that the idea is carried far beyond the walls of the hospital.
Leïla Slimani, a French-Moroccan writer and president of the jury, said at a press conference that ‘Time Shelter’ was a ‘brilliant novel full of irony and melancholy’. It contained “heartbreaking” scenes that made the judges question “the way our memory is the cement of our identity,” she added, but the book was also “a great novel about Europe, a continent that needs a future where the past is reinvented and nostalgia is poison.”
Reviewers have emphasized the political charge at the heart of the novel. Adrian Nathan West, in a review for The New York Times Book Reviewsaid that when reading “Time Shelter” it was impossible “not to think of the reactionary sentiments behind Brexit and MAGA and even Putin’s Great Russia irredentism.”
But Gospodinov was “too delicate to resort to crude political satire,” West wrote. “He is sure that the flight to the past will not undo the conflicts of the present.”
The International Booker Prize is distinct from the more famous Booker Prize, which is awarded to a novel originally written in English, but with the same prize money.
Gospodinov, 55, is the first Bulgarian to win the prize. ‘Time Shelter’, his third novel to be translated into English, beat five others shortlisted books for the price incl Maryse Conde“S”The Gospel According to the New World”, translated from French by Richard Philcox, about a child left behind in Martinique who grows up to be a Christian figure.
Slimani said in the press conference that it took the judges three hours to pick the winner, but there were “no screams or bloody arguments.”
Born in the small town of Yambol, in 1968, Gospodinov is one of the most successful writers in his country. He was a poet before turning to fiction, and his first novel, “Natural Novel”, was published in 1999. The author Garth Greenwell, write in The New Yorker in 2015, said that book “put him at the forefront of his generation of Bulgarian writers, the first to emerge after the country’s transition to democracy.”
Before the award was announced, Rodel said that “the country would have a collective orgasm if we win.”
Several of Gospodinov’s works are inspired by Bulgarian society and politics or beyond the perception of Eastern Europe. His novel “The Physics of Sorrow” followed a protagonist in the saddest country in the world – inspired by Western clichés about the temperament of Eastern Europeans.
In a recent interview linked to the International Booker Prize, Gospodinov said “Time Shelter” looked beyond his country’s borders and was inspired by the global turn to populism. “I come from a system that sold a ‘bright future’ under communism,” he said. “Now the stakes have shifted and populists are selling a ‘good past’.
“I know through my own skin that both checks bounce,” Gospodinov added. “They are backed by nothing.”