OPEN A BOOK,OPEN THE WORLD
𝙏𝙞𝙢𝙚 𝙎𝙝𝙚𝙡𝙩𝙚𝙧
by Gospodinov Georgi
【讓過去治癒一切】
✦2023年布克國際獎得主
✦入選紐約時報2022年度好書
一棟位於蘇黎世被勿忘草包圍的杏桃色建築裡，Gaustine 開設了第一間「過去診所」，一個專門為阿茲海默症患者進行特殊療法的設施。這裡的每一層樓以不同的年代為主題裝潢，並細緻地重現所有細節，讓患者得以回到過去，觸發他們逐漸失去的回憶。小說的敘事者是 Gaustine 的助手，他的工作是蒐集過去殘留的痕跡或是廢棄物，像是1960年代的傢俱、1940年代的鈕扣，甚至是讓人感到懷念的氣味。
「過去診所」對過去的再現漸趨完美，名聲也隨之遠播。有越來越多健康的人來到這裡求助，希望能逃離現在的生活。沒想到過去就此展開了對現在的入侵。不久之後，全世界都想逃離現在，甚至將公投決定要回到哪個版本的過去…
ISBN: 9781474623070
尺寸: 12.8 x 2.4 x 19.6 cm
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.
“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).
