Lit in Translation

Time Shelter

Времеубежище · Vremeubezhishte

Georgi Gospodinov (Георги Господинов, born 1968)

Translated by Angela Rodel

English editions

In English

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A man who hops between years at will, smoking cigarettes of the sixties one day and eating cakes in a seventies café the next, Gaustine dreams up and runs a clinic where the past is the treatment, its rooms recreating earlier decades. People losing their memory find refuge there in the years when they felt happy and secure, and others come out of plain longing. The scheme spreads into a vote across Europe, with every nation picking a decade to live in again. Bulgaria splits almost evenly between yearning for the socialism of the 1960s and 1970s and for the nineteenth-century national revival of the April Uprising, and the narrator is trapped between a future that has been turned down and a past that dictates.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form
Novel
Genres
Satire, Speculative, Politics (assigned by AI)
Set in
Bulgaria
First published
2020 by Janet 45
Author's age
52 when first published
ISBN

9786191865635 (original)

9781324090953 (Liveright, United States)

9781474623025 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, United Kingdom)

9781474623070 (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, United Kingdom)

9781324095224 (Liveright, United States)

More
Wikidata