“Now, there’s everything you need to for a true beginning – bad dreams, war, and a headache.”
“I had already lived through what was to come.”
Current installment of Tommi Reads the World – we’re still in the Bs.
Country: Bulgaria
Title: Time Shelter
Author: Georgi Gospodinov
Language: Bulgarian
Translator: Angela Rodel
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Company 2022 (originally published 2020)
Georgi Gospondinov’s Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel, was the winner of the 2023 International Booker Prize, marking the first time a Bulgarian novel won the prestigious award. (Most of you know I read the Booker Prize longlist every year; I’ve not added the International Booker Prize longlist to those endeavors. Yet.)
Time Shelter is a unique sci-fi novel that barrels headfirst into a dystopian future while also giving us a Bulgarian history lesson. The translation is perfection – the novel smooth gliding without any stiltedness that sometimes comes from translations. And the writing is simply stunning. This is an extremely well-written, well-crafted, and well-developed story. It’s witty, darkly humored, but also soft and comforting, like toast. I can see how it won the International Booker Prize.
The novel centers around “clinics” for memory loss patients, primarily Alzheimer’s patients. These “clinics” are “time shelters” – the shelters being more akin to time capsules that provide protection like bomb shelters. Patients are placed in “clinics” that are entirely composed of things from a time they remember. (Right down to the cigarettes they smoke and the news that’s delivered.) The 1960s are heavily featured, but so is the time just before WWII. The success of these clinics results in the world cashing in – countries are voting on which decade they should “rejoin” and what began as a treatment center becomes a profitable (and dangerous) reenactment movement. To quote Taylor Swift, “I think I’ve seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.”
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 