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Now Winner of the International Booker Prize 2023
German: Zeitzuflucht
Gospodinovs new novel explores a Europe that gives in to the wish to live in the past - can we find shelter from the overwhelming demands of the present by retreating into a different time frame? Our narrator (in interviews, the author refers to him as "me", but of course we as alert readers won't fall for that) meets an enigmatic flaneur named Gaustín. This personified chimera functions, as Gospodinov has explained, as the invisible doppelgaenger we all have, and Gaustín can be everything we are not, because he is not limited by time: He is the result of the decisions we have not made. Now Gaustín first establishes a clinic for Alzheimer patients that is made up of rooms built as different decades of the 20th century. More and more clinics like this one pop up, and healthy people want to retreat into the time shelter of these clinis to flee the present and a future they have lost faith in, until the whole continent starts to take votes to decide in which decade from the past the country wants to live in in the future.

Of course, the whole thing is an allegory of us as individuals idealizing the past, and every country in Europe sees a different time frame as their golden decade due to historic circumstances: The continent falls into time capsules. But the past cannot really be re-enacted, because the future can't be turned into a version of the past - which brings us to the political dimension of new fascist politicians promising to make country X great again. Right after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Gospodinov wrote in a newspaper article: "In my latest novel, I dealt extensively with the ghosts of the past and with 1939 (...). It ends with a meticulously recreated scene from the beginning of World War II. The troops are massed at the border and wait. Suddenly, in the reenactment, a real shot is fired . . .� and then: “Shall we stand forever on the eve of 1939? Even the hour of the attack last Thursday was the same as September 1, 1939. When does everyday life turn back to history? And why, when everything has already happened?�

Putin tries to avoid the future by re-building the past, and it can't work. But we all have to be careful to not close our eyes before future threats, even though the world looks terrifying at the moment. It sounds simple, but it is a big task. Gospodinov's highly ambitious and enteratining novel makes fun of us all (including himself), and we deserve it.

(Fun fact: In the novel, Germany votes to go back to the 90's, starting with late 1989 (when the wall came down). On German tv, there is currently a successful nostalgic series about the summer of 1990, so the first summer after the wall came down. I would lie if I didn't admit that while the story is trashy, the escapism of it - costume design, music, vibe - is great. "Time Shelter" is laughing right in my face, and I appreciate that.)