‘Do not believe politicians who promise you a bright past’: Georgi Gospodinov, author of International Booker Prize-winning novel ‘Time Shelter’

Georgi Gospodinov discusses winning the International Booker Prize in 2023 for his novel Time Shelter, and the power of literature in this interview.

Georgi Gospodinov won the International Booker Prize in 2023 for his novel of ideas, Time Shelter, in which a “clinic for the past” is recreated to treat patients with Alzheimer’s. The book was translated into English from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. In India for the Samsung Galaxy Tab S9 Series Jaipur Literature Festival 2024, Gospodinov discusses his experience of winning the Booker and the process of writing. Edited excerpts from an email interview.

Nostalgia itself is a warm and very human feeling. Each of us feels nostalgia for some past personal memories or places from childhood, for instance. The problem comes when someone starts turning nostalgia into propaganda; when the dealers of the past appear, when the populists come, who want to bring a whole nation back to the past. Do not believe politicians who promise you a bright past.

I like Lotte’s response in the novel. She says, “I would just choose to be 12 in any decade”. But I still feel a terrible curiosity about two decades. I was born in 1968 and I feel like I remember the 1960s, or at least that I dreamed them. I’d like to have an afternoon in 1968, to catch a glimpse of my 20-year-old parents from afar, to get excited with the students in Paris or those in Prague. And then I would like to recall the 90s again. It was one of the most important decades for us in Eastern Europe. I was 20-something and saw the world change before my eyes. In the 90s, we did not manage to finish many important things. And the unfinished always calls you, like an abyss.

In my country, there is a particular and beautiful cult of language. Language has saved us and has been a part of our historical survival for centuries. The Booker Prize came on the very eve of our Day of Alphabet and Language, the best celebration for me. And, as I read my brief words in English after receiving the award, I took the liberty of saying a sentence in Bulgarian. Namely to congratulate everyone on the miracle of language. Because language is one of the few true wonders of the world. We are made of the words we speak. We fall in love through words. We grieve through words. Sometimes, we kill with words. I wrote this novel, and all my books, with the 30 letters I learnt before I started school. And the sheer fact that you can express anything with those letters has remained a miracle to me ever since.

On May 24, after the Booker ceremony, there was incredible joy in Bulgaria. I was still in London, but I saw pictures afterwards. People were telling me stories, stopping me in the street. And I felt really happy. I said to myself that as long as there are people enjoying a book, all is not lost. Besides, this award opens the door to writers from my country, to writers in general from my region. And that’s wonderful.

Not only history but literature can teach us as well. To be honest, I trust literature more than history. History is a bit inhuman, it works with large masses of people and with wide swaths of time and periods. And it often misses the “simple human drama”, as one Bulgarian poet has said. For history, a period of 50-60 years may be a historical second, but for a person, it is his or her whole life. You can learn all about the nature of totalitarian regimes from the great writers. And the rise of totalitarian regimes today also comes from the fact that we forget too easily. We thought we had learnt our lessons, that we had talked enough about World War II, for instance, and we had done our job. The truth is that memory has to be exercised every day, it is not given once and for all. When people remember and have a heart, when they know personally, or from books, the human suffering under totalitarianism, they become one idea less susceptible to propaganda.

There’s a lot of music in the book and that’s natural because it’s a novel about memory. And we know that musical structures remain longest in our memory, even when the process of forgetting has already begun. Music and smells unlock memory most easily. The Beatles are my band, yes, part of the 60s, a decade I think I remember as I’ve already said. ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, ‘Imagine’, ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, and many more, all by The Beatles. But ‘Yesterday’ was the first song of theirs I think I’d heard. And also ‘Yellow Submarine’. Bulgaria under socialism was a closed country and among the few who could travel to the West were international truck drivers. So they were the ones who smuggled a bit of the West — a pair of jeans, a Beatles record or the Eiffel Tower as a souvenir with a thermometer. In 1968, someone started a rumour that The Beatles were planning to come to Sofia for a concert. And suddenly the whole government was shocked and gathered in a secret meeting to figure out how to prevent that.