Time Shelter is so remarkably clever that its cleverness became a distraction to me. I never felt there was a human connection to be found in the happenings on the pages--it was just a story. However witty the flourishes the effect as a whole was a little airless and self-referential. I wanted it to matter more. Just now my thoughts zinged in the direction of Saramago, an author whose books are also often dependent on incredibly clever intellectual absurdities like 'what if everyone went blind?' or 'what if everyone stopped dying?' or 'what if the Iberian Peninsula broke off the European continent?--and yet somehow these absurdities lead the author to such profound meditations on humanity. This novel amazed me just as much as these. But I wanted also to be moved.

Meme after meme after meme- often referring back to my own baby boomer childhood - suggest that everything was perfect in the past, with well-behaved children who played outdoors and housewives and dinner together and church. You know what I mean. These memes don't mention Joseph McCarthy, the Korean or Vietnam wars, Jim Crow, the Cold War.... Gospodinov plays with memory and time including how what is in our minds manifests as reality yet often is particular to us and vastly different from how others would process the same event, moment, whatever. We believe the memes or believe our version and perception of our lives is the one true one, even as the memories shift.

The narrator, a published writer from Bulgaria meets Gaustine, an enigmatic man at a conference and their lives are sporadically intertwined forever. Early on, he unites with Gaustine in a project to establish multi-level properties with each floor completely fit out as a decade, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s... These are residential units for people with dementia/Alzheimers so they can live in a time that still resonates for them and experience more happiness. The concept is very successful and one of these has been set up in Bulgaria.

Meanwhile, all of Europe is having a love affair with the past, to such a degree that every country, EU or not, decides to have a referendum on what decade or year to adopt as the one they will live in. Factions compete with huge rallies representing their time period, sometimes from the 19th century, far too often veering towards the good old days of the Society Union, with cigarettes that are harsh and horrible clothing and the mummified body of a former leader, to the late thirties in Germany, and so forth. Ultimately the winning decades and times are scattered and countries with the same time periods will have to align to make sense of their worlds. But what happens to those who cannot conform or will not accept these drastic changes? And does time move forward again or do you stay frozen in your agreed upon period? Does technology disappear if it is not of the period? What happens to structures like the EU?

And ultimately, whose reality are we experiencing? This brilliant, wry, mind-blowing, easy to read, yet time-consuming novel is WELL worth your time. It is of our times and of other times. It is observant and cynical and funny and scary, the characters and events known through only a dreamy, well-educated but unreliable narrator. Highly recommend!

A thought-provoking rumination on time and memory and later, in "Referendum on The Past," a fascinating, timely thought-experiment. But this is also such a laborious, uneven read. The narrator's musings become painfully rambling. And without a cohesive plotline or a particularly developed protagonist, any major shift in the story felt like reading a completely different book (this isn't necessarily bad, just more unconventional and made for a slower read). Because of its sheer ambition and because I still think about it a lot, I'm rounding up to 4 stars.

This is the first I’ve read from Georgi Gospodinov and it will not be the last. An utterly amazing read. This book is a mind bender but was totally enjoyable to read. Reminded me of Calvino at times. Definitely a touch of weird literature. It’s tough to leave a more detailed review without giving away plot points but I will say I ended up with what seems to be 2/3 of the book highlighted in quotes. Philosophically this blew my mind. Oddly, this book also helped me more than recent therapy in the way I can think about the death of a loved one, or the loss of time with them. Some of that weight has been lifted from my chest.

This award-winning Bulgarian book is being released in English for the first time, and I'm surprised I haven't heard much about it. After all, how intriguing does this synopsis sound?

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.

I really enjoyed the rich detail we get of past decades. The writing is smart with the style of an older, classic novel. It doesn't take itself too seriously, and it was always exciting to see what was to come.

When you reach a certain age, the future becomes an uncertain horror and the past a comfort, a certainty. Through the voice of a forever nameless narrator, we are introduced to Gaustine, an elusive, mysterious charachter darting in and out of the narrator's life and the story. Gaustine is facinated by time and speaks like he literally occupies certain eras of the past.

The narrator meets Gaustine first at a convention and over the years receives brief, odd communications from him. He is eventually called on by Gaustine to come and assist him in a creating Time Shelters in which people with dementia, unable to live in the present, can come and be comforted by rooms decorated to resemble those from the past. The idea is wildly successful and soon expands to whole areas of cities in all parts of Europe made up to look like they did in a certain years. Even newspapers are reprinted day by day.

Soon, anonymous leaders of countries whose futures seem as chaotic and painful as a dementia patient's look to enlarge upon the Time Shelter idea. Countries are called on to pick a decade in which they would like to go back to. National referendas are held and decades picked. "Yes" the leaders say, "...it might be a 'secondhand' future. It's still better than the nothingness yawning before us now..."

The above is the scaffolding on which the author uses to build a compelling and thought provoking narrative that is a meditation on the history, time and how we all perceive them. Looking back, the narrator says in speaking about Europe on the brink of war, "Most likely 1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid."

The hours in reading this book were well spent. It was a challenging read but also thought provoking and entertaining. I am grateful to the publisher and Netgalley for an ARC and I will likely buy a copy for myself when it comes out.

When Metaphor Becomes an Illness.........

So if you combine time travel and slipstream do you get something like "timeslip"?


There are only two ways to comment on this book. You can try to summarize it, which isn't a bad approach except for the fact that any decent summary would have to be almost as long as the novel. Or, you could just flounder around with lots of references to time, history, nostalgia, memory, lost memory, lost time, the comforts of the past, and that sort of thing. If you were to take that second path you'd also have to make reference to Mann, Borges, Proust, Camus, Calvino, Kafka, St. Augustine, and pretty much every other fancy pants writer, philosopher, historian, or physicist who ever looked back, looked forward, and wondered about why or if they were different.


So, the best bit of help is this - This book is truly elegant literary fiction, with wry wit, deep human understanding, and historical breadth, that will reward the patient reader with a rare and memorable experience.


(Please note that I received a free advance ecopy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

4.5/5

In Georgi Gospodinov's ‘Time Shelter’ our narrator ( a Bulgarian novelist) takes us through his association with Augustine-Garibaldi (“And so early theology and late revolutionism were brought together.”) or Gaustine as we get to know him.Gaustine is a geriatric psychiatrist who uses his knowledge to treat those suffering from Dementia or Alzheimer’s by creating a safe space for them – a space and time defined by their state of mind, a time they associate with happiness. His “clinic of the past” features rooms that are meticulously designed, each representative of a decade in history. Our narrator assists him in acquiring objects and memorabilia that are to be used in setting up the said facilities- from wall calendars and posters to typewriters and radios to cigarettes and chocolates – no holds barred in recreating a figment of the past that corresponds to the patients' memories- a “protected past”.

“The time is coming when more and more people will want to hide in the cave of the past, to turn back. And not for happy reasons, by the way. We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will.”
As the clinic in Zurich expands and new decades are introduced into the framework, Gaustine correctly assumes an approaching era when people, in an attempt to escape their present lives, would voluntarily choose to go back to a time and place when they felt more content or safe. This starts with Gaustine allowing family members and friends to accompany the patients to make them feel at home and provide them with insight into details of their lives – an example we see with a patient who was once surveilled by the Socialist State being visited by the very same government agent who was assigned to follow him decades ago and report his actions- to fill in the gaps in his memories. (“If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?”) Gradually the desire to postpone the future spreads and the lines between past and present start to blur and recycled pasts/secondhand futures become the call of the day with European nations opting to “vote for the past” and revert to a glorious phase in their history, recycling the past into the future rather than advancing into a future that does not hold much promise -but not without consequences. (“The world had become a chaotic open-air clinic of the past, as if the walls had fallen away.”)

The author discusses the past and present politics of the Eastern European nations and the EU through significant historical landmarks which are explored in the process of creating a time map for the countries of the union- the shared past, the distinct present and the point of reset when the timelines would eventually merge, if at all. As the situation worsens, with nations descending into chaos and anarchy, Gaustine disappears and the narrator's own memories seem to start collapsing into one another.(“While writing a novel about those who have lost their memories, he himself begins to lose his memory . . . He rushes to finish it before he forgets what he was writing.”) The reader (and the narrator) is compelled to question whether Gaustine is a real person who actually exists or a figment of the narrator’s imagination. “Gaustine, whom I first invented,and then met him in flesh and blood. Or perhaps it was the opposite, I don’t remember.”

The novel is divided into five segments and revolves around the theme of losing, escaping, controlling and halting time and the consequences of choosing to live in the past rather than looking ahead and moving forward. Initially, the tone is that of dry humor and nostalgia but gradually the setting and the tone transform into dystopian and critical. The pace of the novel is slow yet absorbing. The book does require a bit of patience. I did have to look up quite a bit on the Eastern European history referenced in the narrative, but it was well worth the effort. Complex yet brilliant, at times reflective, terrifying and hard-hitting, Georgi Gospodinov's ‘Time Shelter’ is literary fiction in its finest form.
“Does the past disintegrate, or does it remain practically unchanged like plastic bags, slowly and deeply poisoning everything around itself? Shouldn’t there be factories for recycling the past somewhere? Can you make anything else out of past besides past?”

Thanks to NetGalley and W.W.Norton & Company for the digital review copy in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.