A wave of nostalgia has swept Europe, and the novel Time Shelter, which sees entire nations living in a bygone era, won the International Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes for a novel translated into English, on Tuesday. Awarded.
The book’s Bulgarian author, Georgi Gospodinov, will share the prize of £50,000 (equivalent to about $62,000) with Angela Rodel, who translated the novel into English. They received the award at an awards ceremony in London.
The complex novel Time Shelter features a psychiatrist who opens a clinic. In Switzerland, we are working to support people with Alzheimer’s disease. The clinic has a space with intricately detailed recreations of past times to help patients retain their memories, and the experiment proved so successful that the idea spread far beyond the walls of hospitals. Adopted.
Leila Slimani, a French-Moroccan author and jury president, said at a press conference that Time Shelter was “a wonderful novel full of irony and melancholy.” He added that the film contained “heartbreaking” scenes that made the judges “question the strength of memory as an identity”, but that the book was “a continent in need of a future. It was also a wonderful novel about Europe, which is a country,” he added. The past is reinvented and nostalgia is poison. “
Critics emphasize the political denunciation at the heart of the novel. Adrian Nathan West, in his book review for The New York Times, wrote that when reading Time Shelter, “without considering the reactionary sentiments behind Brexit, MAGA, and even Putin’s Greater Russia I can’t stay,” he said.
But Gospodinov was “too sensitive to resort to crude political satire,” West writes. “He is convinced that an escape to the past cannot undo the present conflict.”
The International Booker Prize is different from the well-known Booker Prize, which is awarded to novels written in English, but the prize money is the same.
Gospodinov, 55, is the first Bulgarian to receive the award. His third novel, translated into English, Time Shelter, is about an abandoned child in Martinique, among others, including Marie Condé’s Gospel of the New World, translated from French by Richard Philcox. surpassed the 5 finalists. Grow into a Christ-like person.
At a press conference, Mr. Slimani said it took three hours for the judges to pick the winner, but “there was no shouting or bloody debate.”
Born in 1968 in the small city of Yambol, Gospodinov is one of the country’s most successful writers. He was a poet before turning to fiction and his first novel, ‘Natural Novel’ was published in his 1999. Author Garth Greenwell Writing for the New Yorker magazine In 2015, the book said he “was pushed to the forefront of contemporary Bulgarian writers, emerging for the first time after the country’s transition to democracy.”
“If we win, this country will have a collective orgasm,” Rodel said before the awards were announced.
Some of Gospodinov’s works draw inspiration from external perceptions of Bulgarian society and politics, or Eastern Europe. His novel The Physics of Sadness, which follows a protagonist in the world’s saddest country, is inspired by Western clichés about Eastern European temperament.
of A recent interview in connection with the International Booker Prize, Gospodinov said “Time Shelter” transcends his own borders and was inspired by the global trend towards populism. “I come from a regime that promoted a ‘bright future’ under communism,” he said. “Now the position has changed and populists are selling a ‘bright past’.
“I know firsthand that both checks will be bounced,” Gospodinov added. “They have no backing.”
