Time Shelter: A Novel by Georgi Gospodinov (English) Hardcover Book

Description: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, Angela Rodel WINNER OF THE 2023 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE New Yorker • Best Books of 2022 An award-winning international sensation—with a second-act dystopian twist—Time Shelter is a tour de force set in a world clamoring for the past before it forgets. FORMAT Hardcover LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description "At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created," begins Time Shelters enigmatic narrator, who will go unnamed. "In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ." But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a "vagrant in time" who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century. In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first "clinic for the past," an institution that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimers sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. Serving as Gaustines assistant, the narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even wisps of afternoon light. But as the charade becomes more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic to escape from the dead-end of their daily lives—a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself. "A trickster at heart, and often very funny" (Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker), prolific Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov masterfully stalks the tragedies of the last century, including our own, in what becomes a haunting and eerily prescient novel teeming with ideas. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter is a truly unforgettable classic from "one of Europes most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists" (Dave Eggers). Back Cover "Georgi Gospodinov is unique in many ways. Ive been reading him since the beginning and I know that no one can combine an intriguing concept, wonderful imagination, and perfect writing technique like he can." --Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize-winning author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead "Gospodinov is one of Europes most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists, and this his most expansive, soulful and mind-bending book." --Dave Eggers "In equal measure playful and profound, Georgi Gospodinovs Time Shelter renders the philosophical mesmerizing, and the everyday extraordinary. I loved it." --Claire Messud "In this book, time sneaks away and then returns, reconstituted. Franz Ferdinand is re-assassinated. The cigarettes you liked as a teenager are on sale again. Communism is back, and nice. The book is a satire, witty and scorching, but it is also wise and tender. Your grandmother is there." --Joan Acocella, The New Yorker staff writer "Gospodinov writes like a botanist of the soul: he knows the effects of the pretty mushrooms and the hidden herbs within ourselves in spite of what they look like from afar. The living beings he studies are our versions of our past, the unretrievable, the recreated, the future versions of our past, and how we imbue them with the fantasies and poisons that we cultivate in silence." --Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World "Time Shelter is an extraordinary romp through time and memory, a beautifully written and wonderfully inventive meditation on what the past means to us, whether we can recapture it, and how it defines our present. This is the perfect novel for these cloistered, atemporal times." --Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading "A powerful and brilliant novel: clear-sighted, foreboding, enigmatic . . . in which the future gives way like a rotten beam, and the past rushes in like a flood." --Sandro Veronesi, author of The Hummingbird Author Biography Georgi Gospodinov is one of Bulgarias most lauded authors. His novel Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize and the Premio Strega Europeo, among other prizes.Angela Rodel is a prolific translator of Bulgarian literature and won the International Booker Prize for translation. Review "In this antic fantasy of European politics, narrated by a fictionalized version of the author, an enigmatic friend of his designs a clinic of the past, which soothes Alzheimers patients with environments from a time they can still remember.... History is still news, Gospodinov writes, cunningly drawing attention to the violence that the past wreaks on the present." -- New Yorker, "Best Books of 2022""The morality of artificially returning people to the past, and the broader question of whether this truly brings solace — whether indulgence in nostalgia is curative or pernicious — is the central question of Georgi Gospodinovs newly translated novel… Adroit execution of such wordplay is a testament to the talent of the novels translator, Angela Rodel. [Gospodinov] is sympathetic to the poignancy of things from before — obsolete objects, old brands of coffee, the skipping of antique records — but rebuffs the scapegoats of globalism, immigration and modernization that supposedly killed them off; we are all complicit in the destruction of history, and going backward can only mean intolerance and the exaltation of traditionalist kitsch. Its impossible, when reading all this, not to think of the reactionary sentiments behind Brexit and MAGA and even Putins Greater Russia irredentism, but Gospodinov is too delicate to resort to crude political satire.… Touching and intelligent." -- Adrian Nathan West - New York Times Book Review"Mr. Gospodinov, one of Bulgarias most popular contemporary writers, is a nostalgia artist. In the manner of Orhan Pamuk and Andreï Makine, his books are preoccupied with memory, its ambiguous pleasures and its wistful, melancholy attraction....This difficult but rewarding novel concludes with an image of Europe brought to the brink of renewed conflict—an abstraction that recent events have imbued with the terrible force of reality." -- Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal"A chronicle of time itself: this is the ambitious task undertaken by Georgi Gospodinov, Bulgarias greatest living writer and annalist of an entire nations endless complaints and missed chances, in his Strega Prize–winning novel Time Shelter.... Finished in Berlin just as COVID was on the verge of sweeping through Europe, the novel is at times unnervingly prescient as it issues warnings against the perils of infection — physical, political, even metaphysical.... A poet at heart, Gospodinov can also write a novel in a single sentence: The past is my home country…. He uses the absurdities of the very specific universe of Bulgarian pain, of Bulgarian provincial poverty, to unveil deep wounds…. Angela Rodel, the most prolific and accomplished translator of Bulgarian literature into English, carries over Gospodinovs grand, flowing Bulgarian sentences… into vivid English…. Rodel is part of a grouping of extraordinary women translators working to preserve linguistic diversity.... who are today producing and exporting some of the most compelling and interesting contemporary literature from Bulgaria." -- Isadora Angel - Astra"[An] antic fantasy of European politics.... History is still news, Gospodinov writes, cunningly drawing attention to the violence that the past wreaks on the present." -- The New Yorker"Gospodinovs digressive, philosophical novel is less a work of realist literature than an allegory about the perils of looking backward and attempting to make Switzerland (or Sweden or Germany...) great again . . . translator Rodel keeps the narrators wry voice consistent . . . And in its brisker latter chapters, the story achieves a pleasurably Borges-ian strangeness while sending a warning signal about how memory can be glitch-y and dangerous . . . An ambitious, quirky, time-folding yarn." -- Kirkus Reviews"A radical new therapy tests the power of nostalgia in the electric and fantastical latest from Gospodinov (The Physics of Sorrow).The clever prose sells the zany premise and imbues it with poignant longing: Everything happens years after it has happened.... Most likely 1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid. Thought-provoking and laced with potent satire, this deserves a spot next to Kafka." -- Publishers Weekly"The elegant translation and the short, lyrical chapters in this dystopian tale offer a poignant ode to the dual tragedies of personal and universal memory loss." -- Lucy Lockley - Booklist Review Quote "The morality of artificially returning people to the past, and the broader question of whether this truly brings solace -- whether indulgence in nostalgia is curative or pernicious -- is the central question of Georgi Gospodinovs newly translated novel... Adroit execution of such wordplay is a testament to the talent of the novels translator, Angela Rodel. [Gospodinov] is sympathetic to the poignancy of things from before -- obsolete objects, old brands of coffee, the skipping of antique records -- but rebuffs the scapegoats of globalism, immigration and modernization that supposedly killed them off; we are all complicit in the destruction of history, and going backward can only mean intolerance and the exaltation of traditionalist kitsch. Its impossible, when reading all this, not to think of the reactionary sentiments behind Brexit and MAGA and even Putins Greater Russia irredentism, but Gospodinov is too delicate to resort to crude political satire.... Touching and intelligent." Details ISBN1324090952 Year 2022 ISBN-10 1324090952 ISBN-13 9781324090953 Format Hardcover Imprint WW Norton & Co Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States Language English Pages 304 AU Release Date 2022-06-10 NZ Release Date 2022-06-10 UK Release Date 1900-01-01 Author Angela Rodel Translator Angela Rodel Subtitle A Novel Illustrations 19 black-and-white drawings Publisher WW Norton & Co DEWEY 891.8134 Audience General Publication Date 2022-06-10 US Release Date 2022-06-10 Alternative 9781324095224 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:135181341;

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