Georgij Gospodinov, time and nostalgia

Gaustín will soon receive the Booker International Prize. OR Georgij Gospodinov Just won the Booker International Prize? Yes, that is the second option: the Bulgarian author was awarded for his book storms, “a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy. It is a profound work that is connected to a very contemporary question: what happens to us when memories disappear“, wrote the president of the jury.

But the dichotomy between Gaustín and Gueorgui is perfectly justified for those who know the writer’s work, for those who are familiar with his recurring character and his ability to experiment with fiction and time: time as a structural feature of the narrative, but also as a result of people’s perception of that dimensionnot defined at all for Gueorgui Gospodinov (Yambol, Bulgaria, 1968).

More than something that can be quantified and sequenced, for the writer, time is both a sensation and a feeling: memories, nostalgia or even scents that define each era. In his latest book he asks: “At what point does everyday life become history?”, a work of recomposition that he implements in his novels. In them, he interweaves the real and the fictitious, as well as literary and other existential considerations. This leads him to “less memory, more past”, he writes, as if assuming this oblivion encourages fiction. The idea supports his work stormswhere Alzheimer’s of some signs is not as malignant a diagnosis as the collective melancholy suffered by a society obsessed with the past, a sinister caricature of today. He warns himself: “Every utopia sooner or later becomes a historical novel”.

irony and subtlety

It is his most logical, most academic, most political, most “of his time” book. A media requirement that is sometimes confused with virtue, but which, combined with the Lord’s talent, irony and subtlety, is enough to achieve the highest recognition. Among other things, on this occasion, beat the Mexican Guadalupe Nettel and the Catalan Eva Baltasar in the race for the International Booker.

For those who don’t know, composition from stormsworthy of the liberated Kurt Vonnegut, and his attention to detail, whose most entomological version is reminiscent of Xosé Luís Méndez Ferrín, will be as demanding as they are surprising. However, it is not about spontaneous innovation, but the culmination (at the most optimistic) or the ruin (at the most realistic) of his brilliant The physics of grief and a novel about natureand all (three) published by the publishing house Alava Fulgencio Pimentel. Perhaps Gospodinov, like a caricature of himself, abused his past novels.