‘Time Shelter’: The International Booker winner is a rich experiment in style, structure and ideas

A philosophical exploration of memory and nostalgia, about forgetting and trying to hold on to our past and make sense of our present and future, Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter is a worthy winner of this year’s International Booker prize.

If ours is an age of privation, this expansive novel symbolises opulence: of ideas, meanings, utopian aspirations and the bizarre brilliance of the human mind. The author convenes memory, nostalgia and history together with the individual and the nation, to chart a narrative arc over the territories of remembrance and oblivion. Above all, it is a book about time, in its fragments and in its perpetuity.

As with so many prize-winning novels, Time Shelter conjures up episodes of human history to make us ponder what we have gone through and what we are living with. It is a book that forces the reader to go slow, given the sheer amount of stimulation for the senses and ideas that it has to offer.

The author’s use of history is masterful and central to the narrative. The novel is a great experiment in terms of narrative style, structure and ideas, and can only come from a literary culture that is not bogged down by canons and rules.

Gospodinov is an acclaimed poet, playwright and writer both in Bulgaria and...

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