Time Shelter, written by Georgi Gospodinov and translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, has won the International Booker Prize 2023. The £50,000 prize is divided equally between the two.
Time Shelter centres on the first “clinic for the past” for Alzheimer’s sufferers where each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to go back in time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. As word spreads about the clinic an increasing number of healthy people seek refuge, hoping to escape the horrors of modern life, thereby creating an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present and the narrator becomes entrenched in a plot to stop time itself.
Irish Times reviewer Declan O’Driscoll called it “an immensely enjoyable book which achieves depth with an affable narrative voice”.
“Time Shelter is a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy,” Leïla Slimani, chair of the judges, said. “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.”
It is commonly assumed that ‘big themes’ are reserved for ‘big literatures’, or literatures written in big languages, while small languages, somehow by default, are left with the local and the exotic.
Gospodinov said: “Writers, not only from my country, but also from the Balkans often feel themselves outside the sphere of English-speaking attention. It is commonly assumed that ‘big themes’ are reserved for ‘big literatures’, or literatures written in big languages, while small languages, somehow by default, are left with the local and the exotic. Awards like the International Booker Prize are changing that status quo, and this is very important. I think every language has the capacity to tell the story of the world and the story of an individual person.”
Rodel said: “There unfortunately seems to be a chauvinistic belief in the English-speaking world that translations are second fiddle, somehow less-than or less desirable than original works in English. A major international prize like the International Booker challenges this short-sighted, Anglo-centric assumption and demonstrates that we have a moral responsibility to hear voices from beyond our comfort zone, to recognise that the lived experiences of people whose language is not English holds just as much insight into the human condition as our own literature does.”
Gospodinov, described by La Repubblica as “a Proust coming from the East”, is the most translated and internationally awarded Bulgarian writer to emerge after the fall of communism. Time Shelter is his third novel to be published in English. The Italian edition won the prestigious European Strega Prize last year.
Rodel was born in Minnesota and is a professional literary translator living and working in Bulgaria. In 2014, she was awarded Bulgarian citizenship for her contribution to Bulgarian culture.
