In his ingenious new novel Time Shelter, International Booker Prize winner 2023, Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov and translator Angela Rodel create a unique landscape which is curiously painted with fantasy and reality. The multilayered story has at its heart a beautifully constructed clinic for Alzheimer’s disease patients which becomes highly addictive to an entire citizenry who are not even dementia patients, but wish to check into the facility which becomes their “time shelter”.
A clinic for the past is a unique concept. Imagine your beloved parent or spouse on that precarious precipice of losing his or her mind and you are forced into a corner to put them in an Alzheimer’s or dementia care facility. Your choices are dreary and heart wrenching — but for one incredibly novel facility where your loved one can be housed on a bespoke floor that replicates the decade they are most comfortable in.
If they are from the 60s era, then they have the luxury to check into the 1960s themed floor where the music, the colours, the paraphernalia and even the fragrance is a throwback to the Beatles era. So attentive to minutiae is the theme clinic in the reproduction of the era that each of the floors of the facility where the forgetful patients are housed, the light quality, and clarity or dimness is tailormade.
When it is only the long-term memory that works, transporting the Alzheimer’s patient to a past that comes alive and creates a zone of familiarity and comfort is nothing short of a magic carpet ride that is highly attractive not only because it freezes the spatial dynamic, but time as well.
As the living space becomes more and more convincing, a greater number of healthy people look for and register at the time shelter, seeking to escape the terrifying challenges of modern life, especially as they grow old. This causes a consternation when the past begins to take over the present.
Writer Gospodinov is a canny, clever, and creative genius with a persuasive pen. The writer successfully unveils the business sense in his protagonist Dr Gaustin, a therapist who sees a global marketplace for his theme clinics to cater to his Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.
“There’s a lot of work yet to be done,” Gaustin said, wiping the lenses of his round glasses”.
Dr. Gaustin continues: “Here you see a middleclass ‘60s. But the past is pricey and not everyone can afford it. And you do realise that not every past and not every youth was like this. We need to have a ‘60s for the workers, student dorms — as well as a 1960s for those who lived in Eastern Europe.... One day, when this business really takes off, we’ll create these clinics or sanatoriums in various countries. The past is also a local thing”.
In a recent interview, Gospodinov said: “In the 1990s, I thought of the guilty pleasures of the 70s and 80s. I had to invent the nostalgias of the 70s and 80s. I had to invent the nostalgias of the different countries. It was very hard for me to create exact nostalgia for Vienna. This book begins with Vienna. Writers like to believe that they invent everything. What if each floor of these clinics was dedicated to a different decade? Then I started to think that the past can be dangerous — the idea of clinics of the past, safe havens. Not about golden age. As you age you find comfort in the past. You return to the memories of the past of when you were safe and happy and you go back to that place where you find comfort — and suddenly you realise that you are in maximum danger. Europeans realised they cannot have referendums about the future anymore.”
The novel takes us to Jacques Le Goff’s idea of history and memory, which chimes with much of what Time Shelter is about. Like Le Goff, Gospodinov also works on the premise that memory can be both an individual phenomenon as well as societal and collective.
There is a well-remembered instance when Gospodinov was writing Time Shelter in 2019, he was unsure about a passage that he worried might be considered somewhat overdone even for a kind of genre of absurdist fiction. This passage dealt with a wave of nostalgia that led several European countries to organise large-scale re-enactments of past events, and Gospodinov was unsure about a section in which a country recreates World War II and invades its neighbour, causing widespread devastation. Gospodinov says, “I thought maybe I should have skipped it, it’s too much. But then it happened… when Russia invaded Ukraine.”
In this novel, which encourages meditation and analysis of history and philosophy, there is also much that appeals to the reader by way of the conjuring of language and its precision and evocative employment. The author is witty and deals with the fragility of the past and the egregiousness of the present with sensitivity and grace. In the story, a tsunami of nostalgia prods some European countries to orchestrate large-scale spectacles of past events.
Gospodinov, who is soft-spoken and self-effacing in conversation, argues that surging global interest in Eastern European authors may be connected to a global climate increasingly shaped by nationalism and Russian aggression, given the region’s decades living “in a totalitarian society” under Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Georgi Gospodinov is 55 years of age but seems to be carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders. Soviet domination, he has said over and over again, is what makes the East European experience rare and uncommon for the rest of the world.
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov
In addition to his two other powerful novels, Natural Novel and Physics of Sorrow, Gospodinov is also the author of several thought-provoking books of short stories, essays and poetry. His storytelling has a stylistic resemblance to the fragmented, fissured, and dysfunctional reality around us, and he employs his own personal and family history to gesture towards world history.
Gospodinov’s work engages with the problems of how Europe deals with the past. Critics of Bulgarian literature maintain that writers had played a leading role in the reinvention of Bulgaria’s literature scene after the end of the Cold War.
Communist satellite states such as Bulgaria that fell under the sway of the Soviet Union between 1946 and 1990 often banned literature that did not bolster their political agenda. Later, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the propaganda style Bulgarian literature was no longer supported financially and fizzled away.
Time Shelter was a bestseller in Bulgaria in 2020, and in May 2023 it was awarded the International Booker Prize for fiction translated into English. It brought a glory unheard of in the legion of Bulgarian writers. Modern Bulgarian literature has been a fledgling as literatures go, and has been struggling to make a mark in the last four decades. After Communism’s collapse, Gospodinov was active in protests for democratic elections, and later edited an influential newspaper and co-founded a literary group that published ironic articles on canonical Bulgarian writers.
Leila Slimani, chair of judges for the International Booker Prize 2023, said, “A jury is a complex thing, the alchemy of which is very subtle. Our winner, Time Shelter, is a brilliant novel, full of irony and melancholy. It is a profound work that deals with a very contemporary question: What happens to us when our memories disappear? Georgi Gospodinov succeeds marvellously in dealing with both individual and collective destinies, and it is this complex balance between the intimate and the universal that convinced and touched us.”
“In scenes that are burlesque as well as heartbreaking, he questions the way in which our memory is the cement of our identity and our intimate narrative. But it also a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented and nostalgia is a poison.”
Julie Banerjee Mehta is the author of Dance of Life, and co-author of the bestselling biography Strongman: The Extraordinary Life of Hun Sen. She has a PhD in English and South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto, where she taught World Literature and Postcolonial Literature for many years. She currently lives in Calcutta and teaches Masters English at Loreto College