Georgi Gospodinov

[Time Shelters] is many things: an exploration of memory and memory loss, an imagined future where each European country chooses a different decade in which to live, and a meta-novel where the narrator/author is at once the creator and the created.

The protagonist Gospodinov is an author who is both the creator and friend of a man named Gaustine, an enigmatic figure who wants to create apartments styled in the manner of specific years for Alzheimer patients who remember only the past. show more Gospodinov helps him by researching the news, foods, sounds, and smells of past decades. The clinics are so popular that even those with intact memories wish to participate: to relive their childhoods or the best years of their lives. Eventually the European countries hold referendums and each chooses which year/decade they will recreate and live in. The campaigns are often ideologically opposed, such as in Bulgaria, where the Nationalists (wishing to return to the apex of the Bulgarian national identity and the uprising against the Ottomans in April 1876) are running against the Socialists (wanting to recreate the years of mature socialism, 1960s and 70s). After the referendums, chaos seems imminent with borders eroding between times, enclaves refusing to join the mainstream time period, and the breakdown of history itself.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of the book, when Gaustine is creating his clinics, and Gospodinov (the character) tells the stories of individuals. My favorite is the man who reconnects with the agent who had reported on him for decades, in order to learn the past he can no longer remember. The second part, dealing with the referendums, dragged. I liked the Bulgarian rallies with the Socialists recreating the mausoleum of Dimitrov and the Nationalists dressed in their costumes and sabers, and it was interesting to think about which decade Denmark or Spain would chose, but it went on too long. The final pages, in which Gospodinov himself starts to lose his memories and is confused if he is author or character was a nice way to wrap up the metafictional aspect.

Gospodinov (author) is a deft writer, and I marked many passages that were either well-written or had interesting ideas or both. Here is a passage from early in the book:

And so, Gaustine and I created our first clinic for the past. Actually, he created it, I was only his assistant, a collector of the past. It wasn't easy. You can't just tell somebody: Okay, here's your past from 1965. You have to know its stories, or if you have no way of getting them anymore, then you have to make them up. To know everything about that year. Which hairstyles were fashionable, how pointy the shoes were, how the soap smelled, a complete catalog of scents. Whether the spring was rainy, what the temperatures were in August. What the number one hit song was. The most important stories of the year, not just the news, but the rumors, the urban legends. Things got more complicated depending on which past you wanted delivered to you. Did you want your Eastern past, if you were from the eastern side of the wall? Or on the contrary, did you want to live out precisely that past which had been denied to you? To gorge yourself on the past as if on the bananas you had dreamed about your whole life?

The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined. show less

This inventive and daring novel is narrated by an unnamed Bulgarian writer who befriends a geriatric psychiatrist named Gaustine, who creates rooms in a building in Zürich that are set in different decades of the 20th century which are furnished with authentic furniture, newspapers & magazines, radios & televisions and other items, and elderly people with dementia are invited to spend time in a room that reminds them of their past, in an effort to stimulate their memories and enrich their show more lives. The experiment is wildly successful, and Gaustine opens similar clinics in other cities. He becomes concerned about what will happen to these patients once they return to the realities of the 21st century, and that, combined with the interest of the public to recreate beloved periods in European countries, in which the citizens of each country can vote to choose the decade they would wish to live in. These peoples take on roles of famous figures and ordinary citizens of the decade that their countrymen chose, and recreate the past, with utmost seriousness, but also with some unintended consequences.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first part of Time Shelter, which dealt with the clinics for patients with dementia, but the author, like Gaustine, tried to do too much in creating cities and countries that attempted to recreate the past. Reading it was akin to a children’s game I used to play, in which kids would hold hands in a park, run around in a circle with increasing rapidity, and the kids at the periphery would progressively fly off in different directions, dizzy and disoriented. This was a very clever novel with compelling ideas, and perhaps it would benefit from a second reading for me to truly appreciate it. show less

Time Shelter is a novel about memory that speculates beyond the salubrious effects that nostalgia can have on the aging mind to the broader and potentially damaging outcomes that could result when the act of remembering is appropriated by authorities for political gain. Georgi Gospodinov’s ingenious conceit is that an enigmatic character—a psychologist named Gaustine—has opened a clinic for dementia patients where various rooms are outfitted in ways that recall an earlier show more decade—complete with fixtures, appliances, paint colours, wallpaper patterns, and even commercial products (snacks, cigarettes) from the era—a time when the patients felt secure and were living active, rewarding lives. The hope is that the patient’s memory will be stimulated by the familiar surroundings, and they will become more engaged and outgoing as a result. Gaustine’s plan is successful. Soon he is preparing to expand his operation beyond the original stand-alone clinic in Zurich to other European cities. But, as we see, with great success comes greater scrutiny and greater demand, and even abuse. The novel is narrated in a somewhat ironic tone by an unnamed friend of Gaustine, a Bulgarian who bears more than a passing resemblance to the author. He tells us that as Gaustine’s clinics gain in popularity, the clientele grows beyond dementia sufferers to healthy folk who simply want to re-live happier times and are willing to pay a fee for the experience. Eventually Gaustine disappears (the narrator suspects he’s decamped to the US) as the idea of living in the past spreads across the continent and takes off in the European political realm. Referendums will be held: citizens will vote for the decade to which their country will return. But nothing is simple because no two countries, just as no two people, share quite the same experience of the past. One country’s pleasing memory is another country’s horror. In its latter sections Gospodinov’s novel becomes a sardonic critique of 20th-century European history. Because the narrative is driven by abstract supposition rather than the fates of individuals, the reader’s connection to the action is intellectual rather than emotional, resulting in a novel that does not generate much suspense in the conventional sense. Instead, we turn the pages to see where Gospodinov’s playful conjectures are taking us. What we learn from Time Shelter—that the past does not actually shelter us from the present—is not unexpected. Still, it is a lesson that many world leaders would do well to bear in mind as we move forward. show less

I pitched this to my book group thinking it was one thing, and it turned out to be completely different. I expected the book to mostly focus on dementia and how to help patients relive certain times of their life, and there is that, but then it spins out into a long discussion of Bulgarian politics, how entire countries can get hooked on nostalgia and what damage can be done by a referendum. Hard not to see this through my UK lense of Brexit and stupid Facebook pages about how 'things were show more better in the olden days', but it might read entirely differently in his native Bulgaria, a country I know little about. Its interesting and experimental, but also a little disjointed, with different sections reading almost like separate short stories. Overall a really thought provoking and interesting read. show less