Reading guide: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel

A ‘clinic for the past’ run by an enigmatic therapist offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time to a familiar, safer, happier moment. 

An unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents, and even afternoon light. But as the rooms within the clinic become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek refuge there, hoping to escape the horrors of modern life - a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Soon, entire countries want to emulate the idea, with referendums taking place to decide which particular version of the past will shape each nation’s future.

Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter cements Georgi Gospodinov’s reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our times, and a major voice in international literature.  

Georgi Gospodinov was born in Yambol, Bulgaria, and his works have been translated to acclaim in 25 languages. Bulgaria’s best-known contemporary writer, whose work includes poetry and plays, Gospodinov has been shortlisted for more than a dozen international fiction prizes - including the PEN Literary Award for Translation, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the Bruecke Berlin Preis, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt Literaturpreis. He won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the 2019 Angelus Literature Central Europe Prize and the 2021 Premio Strega Europe, among others.  

Angela Rodel is a musician and literary translator who lives and works in Bulgaria. Rodel holds degrees from Yale and UCLA, and has received NEA and PEN translation grants. Her translation of Georgi Gospodinov’s Physics of Sorrow won the 2016 AATSEEL Prize for Literary Translation. In 2014, she was awarded Bulgarian citizenship for her translation work and contribution to Bulgarian culture.

The book’s central character, Gaustine, who comes up with the idea of the clinics of the past, is a mysterious, enigmatic and charismatic figure, and the narrator often struggles to understand him. ‘I was never sure when he was joking or whether he joked around at all.’ (page 44). To begin with, he seems to be a visionary, providing a radical and successful form of therapy. Later in the book, the narrator calls him a ‘monster’. Did you find Gaustine a likeable character or a dangerous and malevolent figure, or both?

When interviewed for the Booker Prizes website, Georgi Gospodinov said his career had been inspired by ‘[my] grandmother’s stories that I listened to as a child. Stories that blended fiction and reality, with no clear end to one and beginning to another. Stories that had voices and whispers, and miracles at the end.’ Can you see these influences in Time Shelter? 

At several points in the book, the narrator, who is an author, mentions that he invented or dreamt up Gaustine. He calls Gaustine his ‘invisible friend, more real and visible than my very self’. Both narrator and Gaustine share the initials G.G. and are Bulgarian (like Georgi Gospodinov). To what extent are the two main characters and the book’s author all the same person? Did you find the book’s metafictive elements successful?

The novel can be read as an increasingly outlandish satire about modern society’s idealisation of the past and the dangers of such an outlook when on a mass scale. It’s a timely read, one which the Guardian said addresses the ‘weaponisation of nostalgia’. Would you agree that we live in an age where nostalgia has been weaponised?

The panel of International Booker Prize judges called the book ‘morbidly humorous’. How does the author’s use of humour and irony contribute to the book as a whole? 

At one point during the story, Gaustine retreats to the year 1939, which is referenced at the beginning of the book as ‘the end of human time’. The ending of the book also leans into this moment. Why does Gospodinov keep circling back to this date? 

La Repubblica described Gospodinov as a ‘Proust coming from the East’. Do you agree with this statement? What are the similarities between the two writers?

An extract from one of Gaustine’s academic papers reads: ‘The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells, and fills the freed-up niches with ersatz-memory. The light industry of memory. The past made from light materials, plastic memory as if spit out by a 3-D printer. Memory according to needs and demand.’ To what extent do you agree with Gaustine’s view?

Gaustine’s clinic offers the opportunity to not only experience one’s own past, but an alternative past that an individual might have wished for; a past denied to them. ‘The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined.’ (page 47) To what extent does Gospodinov play with the idea that we can be nostalgic for something that we didn’t experience, or that never existed? 

The English title is a neologism, as is the novel’s original, Bulgarian title. What meaning did you grasp from this, if any? What do you think was the author and translater’s intention in choosing this title?