Monday, May 29, 2023

More Gospodinov News

 I have written before about Georgi Gospodinov: Georgi Gospodinov Wins International BookerNew Georgi Gospodinov Novel; and World Novels 7-25-21.

It does make me feel good to have read someone before they got an award like the International Booker, someone I liked. I can convince myself that I might know a little.

Two pieces showed up from The Guardian.

International Booker winner Georgi Gospodinov: ‘My dystopian novel became real’ is an interview. It has this summary of the novel:

Time Shelter is Gospodinov’s third novel involving the character of Gaustine, a time-travelling flaneur, whose prescription of past memories as relief for the unhappiness of Alzheimer’s disease opens a Pandora’s box of weaponised nostalgia. “The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined,” writes his narrator. Literature is to blame for everything, he and Gaustine decide – and in the case of Brexit it’s the fault of Robinson Crusoe: “I’ll be fine on my own, Robinson declares, God is with me. We’ll be fine on our own, his descendants say, God save the queen (but even without her we’ll be fine).”

Before long, every European nation is copying “Great Brexitania”, with referendums to decide to which eras they want to return. Sweden chooses the 1970s, the expansionist decade of Abba and Ikea; most of central Europe opts for the hopefulness of the late 1980s, when regime change was in the air; Bulgaria, split between late socialism and a semi-mythical age of heroes, settles for a mashup in which “men in breeches lay down next to women with shellacked hairdos”.

Over here, I think we'd call it speculative fiction. What attracted me to the Central and Eastern European writers was that they feel to me to be on the margins of literary Europe. I feel the Midwest is on the margins of literary America. They have a literary tradition, so does the Midwest. And they were doing interesting things with their stories when I felt constrained by what models I had to work with.

The other article is International Booker prize announces first ever Bulgarian winner. Maybe the Booker also shared some of my perspective:

Time Shelter is Gospodinov’s fourth book to be translated into English. It concerns the opening of a “clinic for the past” that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, with everything from furniture, cigarettes and drinks from the era, to newspapers that cover each day of the decade. As word spreads, healthy people begin to seek refuge in the clinic to escape the horrors of modern life.

Slimani said the novel “questions the way in which our memory is the cement of our identity and our intimate narrative.

“But it is also a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented and nostalgia is a poison,” she continued. “It offers us a perspective on the destiny of countries like Bulgaria, which have found themselves at the heart of the ideological conflict between the west and the communist world.”

 So, go find his books, read them. Prove me wrong, that they have nothing to say to us. 

sch 5/28

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