Nostalgia leading to war: With his novel Time Shelter, winner of the International Booker Prize, the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov imagined a “dystopia” that became reality to his dismay, he says in an interview with the AFP. Crowned with his translator Angela Rodel from the prestigious British award crowning the best novel translated into English each year, the 55-year-old author is now a real star in Sofia.
In this poorest country in the European Union, plagued by corruption and political crises, the media compare the wave of euphoria born of this International Booker Prize to the festivities that followed the exceptional journey of the national football team at the 1994 World Cup.
“I realize how much Bulgarian society needs bright news, especially in recent years,” says Georgi Gospodinov, gray hair cut short and T-shirt tribute to the video game Pac-Man. Bulgaria had forgotten the awesome “feeling of 1994 when you felt like you were moving mountains!”, he ignites.
The melancholy Time Shelter takes the reader to a “clinic of the past” for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Cigarette marks, furniture, soap smells, wallpaper, period tubes… each room recreates the atmosphere of a decade down to the smallest detail, offering a journey through time to those who have lost their memories. The success is such that even those who have all their heads take refuge there to protect themselves from the misdeeds of modernity. The past comes to invade the present and all over Europe, governments are “holding a referendum to choose their happy decade”.
The writer came up with the idea for the book, published in 2020, by observing the ongoing glorification of the past in the world. “This is what nationalism and populism feed on,” he deciphers, referring to Donald Trump’s “Great Again” motto or even Brexit. On the other hand, he had “not foreseen” the war in Ukraine and “did not imagine that it would come to this”. If he “is not a prophet”, he recounts, amused, that his 16-year-old daughter threw at him: “Dad, don’t write any more books like that”. “Because soon after, things started to happen, to look like what is being described,” he says. When you live in dystopian times, dystopias materialize.” Its title, Time Shelter, in reference to bomb shelters, was also prescient. The conflict “brought the term up to date”, just as “it propelled us suddenly backwards”, he notes, bitterly.
Born in 1968 in the heart of communist Bulgaria, Georgi Gospodinov says he knows from his childhood “to recognize the dangers of populism, because we have already lived in the promise of a radiant future”. He pleads for “daily memory work”. “In a way, we have started to forget the previous war. And finally, we got to the point where a dictator (Vladimir Putin, Ed.) wanted to bring his country back to the time of the Second World War”.
The writer also honors literature, “antidote to propaganda”, delighted to see dozens of readers ready to wait for hours in the rain to get an autograph. At the recent Sofia Book Fair, Georgi Gospodinov gave time to each of his fans. His “empathy”, he explains, having drawn it from his solitary childhood, on the “ground floor”, literally and metaphorically. It proclaims “the right to be fragile, vulnerable, sad. To be injured, alone, on the weak side, on the losing side”. “Otherwise you can’t live, you can’t tell stories,” he concludes.
