2023/167: Time Shelter — Georgi Gospodinov (translated by Angela Rodel)

2023/167: Time Shelter — Georgi Gospodinov (translated by Angela Rodel)

...one day, very soon, the majority of people will start returning to the past of their own accord, they’ll start “losing” their memories willingly. The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. And not for happy reasons, by the way. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will. [loc. 592]

The first ever Bulgarian winner of the International Booker Prize, Time Shelter deals with nostalgia (in a very different, and much more European, way to Prophet) and features a character who, to a veteran reader of science fiction, appears to be a time traveller. Gaustine, who the narrator isn't sure whether he invented, is 'equally at home in all times'; writes letters to the narrator as if from 1939; and '[jumps] from decade to decade just as we change planes at an airport'. Whether this is time travel or delusion or a kind of performative outsider-ness is never explained.

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