‘Time Shelter’ Wins International Booker Prize
“Time Shelter,” a novel in which a wave of nostalgia sweeps Europe and entire countries consider living in past eras, on Tuesday won the International Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for fiction translated into English.
Georgi Gospodinov, the book’s Bulgarian author, will share the prize of 50,000 British pounds, worth roughly $62,000, with Angela Rodel, who translated the novel into English. They received the award at a ceremony in London.
A complex novel, “Time Shelter” centers on a psychiatrist who creates a clinic in Switzerland to help people with Alzheimer’s disease. The clinic includes spaces that recreate past eras in intricate detail to help patients retain their memories, and the experiment proves so successful that the idea is taken up far beyond the hospital’s walls.
Leïla Slimani, a French-Moroccan author and the chairwoman of the judging panel, said in a news conference that “Time Shelter” was “a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy.” It contained “heartbreaking” scenes that made the judges question “the way in which our memory is the cement of our identity,” she added, but the book was also “a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented and nostalgia is a poison.”
Source: The New York Times
