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WINNER OF THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023 A GUARDIAN AND
FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'The most exquisite kind of
literature... I've put it on a special shelf in my library that I
reserve for books that demand to be revisited every now and then. '
OLGA TOKARCZUK, author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the
Dead 'Could not be more timely... It's funny and absurd, but it's
also frightening, because even as Gospodinov plays with the idea as
fiction, the reader begins to recognise something rather closer to
home... A writer of great warmth as well as skill' GUARDIAN 'In
equal measure playful and profound, Time Shelter renders the
philosophical mesmerizing, and the everyday extraordinary. I loved
it' CLAIRE MESSUD, author of The Woman Upstairs 'A genrebusting
novel of ideas... Gospodinov's vision of tomorrow is the nightmare
from which Europe knows it must awake. And accident, in combination
with the book's own merits, may just have created a classic' THE
TIMES 'Gospodinov is one of Europe's most fascinating and
irreplaceable novelists, and this his most expansive, soulful and
mind-bending book' DAVE EGGERS, author of The Circle 'Touching and
intelligent' NEW YORK TIMES 'A powerful and brilliant novel:
clear-sighted, foreboding, enigmatic' SANDRO VERONESI, author of
The Hummingbird 'An immensely enjoyable book which achieves depth
with an affable narrative voice' IRISH TIMES In Time Shelter, an
enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a 'clinic for the past'
that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each
floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients
back in time. As Gaustine's assistant, the unnamed narrator is
tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from
1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even
afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an
increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a 'time
shelter', hoping to escape from the horrors of our present - a
development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past
begins to invade the present. Intricately crafted, and eloquently
translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter cements Georgi
Gospodinov's reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our
times, a major voice in international literature. Georgi Gospodinov
is one of Europe's most acclaimed writers. Originally from
Bulgaria, his novels have won his country's most prestigious
literary prize twice and have been shortlisted for more than a
dozen international prizes - including the 2015 PEN Literary Award
for Translation, the Premio Gregor von Rezzori, the Premio Strega
Europeo, the Bruecke Berlin Preis, and the Haus der Kulturen der
Welt Literaturpreis. He has won the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize for
Literature, the 2019 Angelus Literature Central Europe Prize and
the 2021 Premio Strega Europeo, among others.
"At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly
the earth had been created," begins Time Shelter's 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
Alzheimer's 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
Gaustine's 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 Europe's
most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists" (Dave Eggers).
Some smuggle cigarettes or alcohol, others weapons, but for
renowned Bulgarian novelist Georgi Gospodinov, the most dangerous
contraband is carried by writers, who surreptitiously move stories
across borders. In The Story Smuggler, Gospodinov explores how
smugglers, writers, and translators are all involved in
transporting whatever may be desired, valued, missing, repressed,
or forbidden. There's a melancholic tone here, as Gospodinov's
exploration focuses on his childhood in Communist Bulgaria and on
the fantasies of other lives and places that this childhood
engendered. Accompanying the text are drawings by award-winning
Bulgarian animator and graphic artist Theodore Ushev, adding a
further layer to its exposition of border-crossing.
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And Other Stories (Hardcover)
Georgi Gospodinov; Translated by Alexis Levitin, Magdalena Levy; Edited by Andrew Baruch Wachtel
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R1,456
R1,329
Discovery Miles 13 290
Save R127 (9%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Stories within stories, a few contemporary fables, a hint of the
narrative complexity of Borges, a whiff of the gritty realism of
pre- and post-communist life in Eastern Europe - these are the
elements that come together in a unique and surprising way in the
wildly imaginative and endlessly engaging short stories of Georgi
Gospodinov. Whether a tongue-in-cheek crime/horror story or the
Christmas story of a pig, a language game leading to an unexpected
epiphany or an inward-looking tale built on the complexity of a
puzzle box, the work in this collection offers a kaleidoscopic
experience of a writer whose style has been described as
""anarchic, experimental"" (""New Yorker"") and ""compulsively
readable"" (""New York Times""). Gospodinov's debut prose work
""Natural Novel"" was hailed as a ""go-for-broke postmodern
construction - a devilish jam of jump-cut narration, pop culture
riffs, wholesale quotation, and Chinese-box authorship"" (""Village
Voice""). At once familiar and fantastic, his writing is high
comedy, high seriousness, and of very high order.
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And Other Stories (Paperback)
Georgi Gospodinov; Translated by Alexis Levitin, Magdalena Levy; Series edited by Andrew Baruch Wachtel
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R496
R470
Discovery Miles 4 700
Save R26 (5%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
Stories within stories, a few contemporary fables, a hint of the
narrative complexity of Borges, a whiff of the gritty realism of
pre- and post-communist life in Eastern Europe - these are the
elements that come together in a unique and surprising way in the
wildly imaginative and endlessly engaging short stories of Georgi
Gospodinov. Whether a tongue-in-cheek crime/horror story or the
Christmas story of a pig, a language game leading to an unexpected
epiphany or an inward-looking tale built on the complexity of a
puzzle box, the work in this collection offers a kaleidoscopic
experience of a writer whose style has been described as
""anarchic, experimental"" (""New Yorker"") and ""compulsively
readable"" (""New York Times""). Gospodinov's debut prose work
""Natural Novel"" was hailed as a ""go-for-broke postmodern
construction - a devilish jam of jump-cut narration, pop culture
riffs, wholesale quotation, and Chinese-box authorship"" (""Village
Voice""). At once familiar and fantastic, his writing is high
comedy, high seriousness, and of very high order.
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