New Georgi Gospodinov Novel

 Who is Georgi Gospodinov? He is a Bulgarian writer who I read in prison. First, there was a short story in Best European Fiction 2010 (it was a leisure library discard, if my memory is correct) and then his Natural Novel (thanks to the interlibrary loan program). I found him worth reading - he writes well, his stories held up.

Now from The Guardian comes news of his new novel: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov review – the dangers of dwelling in the past. Here are some highlights:

Time Shelter is Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s third novel, and for all its focus on the apparently bygone, it could not be more timely. A mysterious therapist, Gaustine, founds a clinic that treats patients with Alzheimer’s by recreating the pasts in which they felt most secure. The “past-clinic” begins with different rooms and floors, decorated with a completist’s precision and an obsessive’s eye for detail: particular cigarette brands, lampshades, wallpaper, archive magazines … Decade by decade, therapeutic time-shelters allow patients to inhabit their temporal “safe spaces”.

***

This novel could have been a clever, high-concept intellectual game with little by way of emotional investment, but Gospodinov is a writer of great warmth as well as skill. His narrator bears close relation to Gospodinov himself: a Bulgarian, born in 1968, for whom the end of communism remains, as it remains in a ghostly way in this novel, a meeting point of past and present. His affection for that period is sincere but also without illusion. He can draw out fully dimensional characters from the broken details of their fractured memories. His transitions – between humour and sadness, absurd situationism and reverberating tragedy, pathos and ironic observation – are never obtrusive. Thanks to the skill and delicacy of Angela Rodel’s translation, these qualities are in abundant display for the anglophone reader.

 The review makes a point that we all might want to keep in mind:

...Nostalgia used to feel like a source of harmless escape, and occasional sustenance. It is starting to seem like a fossil fuel, foreshortening our future as it burns.

I have read Americans do not, will not, read translations. Try this guy. He will surprise you.

sch 5/28/22