COPING WITH THE PAST STRATEGIES MULTIPERSPECTIVE AND INTERDISCIPLINARY APPROACHES

Abstract

The book promotion of the Macedonian translation of Time shelter [mk. Zasolnište na vremeto; bg. Vremeubezhishte] by Georgi Gospodinov in Skopje, in early December 2022, was certainly the event of the day in the capital city of North Macedonia. Gospodinov, unarguably the most prominent contemporary Bulgarian writer, and his newest novel which eventually became the first Bulgarian-language entry to win the International Booker Prize in 2023, were received with pomp by his Macedonian readers little short of the one reserved for music stars or sports idols. The Time shelter, another of his studies of the past minglings with the present – all of them timely translated in Macedonian – depicts clinics of the past where different eras from the recent history are being frozen: an idea which evolved from a Zurich-based Alzheimer center where it is always the middle-class 60s to European (Union) nations’ level in no time. As a crescendo, the ongoing sociopolitical tensions resulted in national referendums about the decades their citizens would prefer to return and live in. In turn, the Bulgarian society crashed over two past decades, while Europe come to the brink of a second First World War. In this very scenario, how much of the past, asks Gospodinov, can a single person stand? (2021, 55).