Time Shelter by Georgi Godspodinov

I really loved this book, even as I sit down to think and write about it and realize that I am not at all sure that I fully understood it. So it goes. This won the Book Prize for International Literature; in other words, something not originally written in English, and therefore the prize goes both to the author and the translator--interesting, as of course I have no way of knowing how exceptional the translation is, and one of the first comments that comes up about this book is someone averring that the translation is dreadful. So, all I can really say is that this is a mesmerizing book, maybe even better in Bulgarian, but excellent in it's English form (and also apparently in Italian, as it won a parallel award for that translation). The work has many themes, though few are as emphatic as humanity’s complex relationship to time. The novel asks a lot of intriguing questions revolving around time, our concept of it, the fact that we lead finite lives but instead of looking forward, many of us look backwards to the past, and then and a look at what actually living in the past might look like--what era would you choose? Why? Would it matter what the circumstances you lived in were? Should a European pick the 1980's? Even if living in Bulgaria, with the Soviet Union over lord until the end of that decade? What makes a time a good one? The novel doesn’t provide many answers, leaving those who read it to come to their own conclusions. For a novel so steeped in layers of nostalgia, this open-endedness works well because every reader brings different experiences of the past and so will have different opinions and reactions to interpretations of it. This tendency was most acute in the novel’s intentionally meandering metafictional conclusion, written as the mind of the narrator is fighting against what we all fear on some level, forgetting.