Time Shelter

Georgi Gospodinov

불가리아 작가의 재작년 인터내셔널 부커상 수상작이다.

번역본이 나온 지 얼마 안 돼서 도서관에 아직 없길래 영문 번역본으로 읽는 중이다.

호흡이 짧은 장들로 이루어져 있고 불가리아 역사가 많이 나와서 밀란 쿤데라의 작품과 느낌이 비슷하다.

불가리아도 체코처럼 수난을 많이 겪은 국가라서 그런가 보다.

그래서 이 작품에서 읽은 장면이 쿤데라의 작품에 나온 줄 알고 헷갈리기도 했다.

불가리아뿐만 아니라 유럽 역사가 정말 많이 나와서 작가의 식견이 정말 넓은 것 같다.

예상치 못한 방향으로 내용이 흘러갔는데, 디스토피아를 그렸다고 볼 수도 있겠다.

본문

Isn't it truly astonishing that there is no recording device for scents? Actually, there is one, a single solitary one that predates technology, analog, the oldest of them all. Language, of course. For now, there is nothing else, thus I am forced to capture scents with words and to add them to yet another notebook. We remember only those scents that we have described or compared. Tha remarkable thing is that we don't even have names for smells. God or Adam didn't quite finish the job. It's not like colors, for example, where you've got names like red, blue, yellow violet.... We are not meant to name scents directly. Rather, it's always through comparison, always descriptive. It smells like violets, like toast, like seaweed, like rain, like a dead cat... But violets, toast, seweed, rain, and a dead cat are not the names of scents. How unfair. Or perhaps beneath this impossibility lurks some other omen, which we do not understand...

Lotte, I asked without beating around the bush, what decade would you choose - the sixties, the seventies, or the eighties?
She fell silent for a moment and gave the best answer that can be given to such a question: I'd like to be twelve years old in each of them.
That would be my answer, too.

There doesn't need to be something unusual about the year, Gaustine replied. Time doesn't nest in the unusual, it seeks a quiet, peaceful place. If you discover traces of another time, it will be during some unremarkable afternoon. An afternoon during which nothing in particular has happened, except for life itself...

When people with whom you've shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing, since there's no such thing as half a past. It's as if you've torn a page in half lengthwise and you're reading the lines only to the middle, and the other person is reading the ends. And nobody understands anything. The person holding the other half is gone. That person who was so close during those days, mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights, in the months and years... There is no one to confirm it, there is no one to play through it with. When my wife left, I felt like I lost half my past. Actually, I lost the whole thing.
The past can only be played by four hands, by four hands at the very least.

But what will we do when the future is no longer? How different is a future that is not yet from that which is no longer? How different that absence is. The first is full of promise, the second is an apocalypse...