Time shelter : a novel

Time shelter A novel

Georgi Gospodinov, 1968-

Book - 2022

"An award-winning international sensation-with a second-act dystopian twist-Time Shelter is a tour de force set in a world clamoring for the past before it forgets. "At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created," begins Time Shelter's enigmatic narrator, who will go unnamed. "In the mid-seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ." But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a "vagrant in time" who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues... of the twentieth century. 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. Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself. "A trickster at heart, and often very funny" (Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker), prolific Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov masterfully stalks the tragedies of the last century, including our own, in what becomes a haunting and eerily prescient novel teeming with ideas. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter is a truly unforgettable classic from "one of Europe's most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists" (Dave Eggers)"--

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Subjects
Dementia > Treatment > Fiction.
Space and time > Fiction.
Nostalgia > Fiction.
Memory > Fiction.
Novels.
Genres
Novels
Published
New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company [2022]
Language
English
Bulgarian
Main Author
Georgi Gospodinov, 1968- (author)
Other Authors
Angela Rodel (translator)
Physical Description
304 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781324090953
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

The award-winning Bulgarian author Gospodinov renders a different kind of time-travel novel, one based on memories. Gaustine, an aloof societal observer obsessed with the twentieth century, develops a unique Alzheimer's remedy. He is aided in this endeavor by the unnamed narrator, a struggling writer enamored with his own childhood reminiscences. Gaustine creates a memory-care facility for individuals suffering from dementia, while the narrator procures furnishings, materials, lighting, and scents to imbue each room with the appropriate time ambience. The therapy is such a success, clinics are established in multiple cities. And Gaustine wants to expand, opening centers for not just patients but their families, building complete cities so everyone who wishes can live in the past of their choosing. The narrator is unsettled by the possible repercussions of this but sets it aside as an idea for a potential short novel--until it starts to happen. The elegant translation and the short, lyrical chapters in this dystopian tale offer a poignant ode to the dual tragedies of personal and universal memory loss.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A radical new therapy tests the power of nostalgia in the electric and fantastical latest from Gospodinov (The Physics of Sorrow). In present-day Vienna, geriatric psychiatrist Gaustine redecorates his clinic in the style of the 1960s, replete with miniature pink Cadillacs and Beatles memorabilia. Patients with memory issues appear invigorated by the decor and share more during therapy. The narrator, an unnamed amateur novelist who had the same idea as Gaustine years earlier, comes across an article about the psychiatrist and seeks him out. They strike up an unusual collaboration: Gaustine establishes clinics that painstakingly recreate bygone eras with artifacts tracked down by the novelist. The clinics rapidly expand and start offering services to healthy people, and eventually entire countries opt to simulate returns to supposedly happier eras (France, Germany, and Spain all choose the 1980s). The clever prose sells the zany premise and imbues it with poignant longing: "Everything happens years after it has happened.... Most likely 1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid." Thought-provoking and laced with potent satire, this deserves a spot next to Kafka. (May)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A clinic invites Europeans to live in the past, with all the comforts and perils that doing so brings. The unnamed narrator of Bulgarian author Gospodinov's third novel translated into English has stumbled into the orbit of Gaustine, who's opened a facility in Zurich for people with Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia--"those who already are living solely in the present of their past," as he puts it. Memory care is a legitimate treatment for such patients, but Gospodinov's digressive, philosophical novel is less a work of realist literature than an allegory about the perils of looking backward and attempting to make Switzerland (or Sweden or Germany...) great again. As the popularity of the clinic expands--with different floors dedicated to different decades of the 20th century--the narrator alternates between sketches of various patients and ruminations about modern European history (particularly that of his native Bulgaria) and how time is treated by authors like Thomas Mann, W.H. Auden, and Homer. Eventually, the novel expands into a kind of dark satire of nostalgia and patriotism as more clinics emerge and various European countries hold referendums to decide which point in time it wishes to live in. (France picks the 1980s; Switzerland, forever neutral, votes to live in the day of the referendum.) But, of course, attempting to live in the past doesn't mean you can stay there. Though the story at times meanders, translator Rodel keeps the narrator's wry voice consistent. And in its brisker latter chapters, the story achieves a pleasurably Borges-ian strangeness while sending a warning signal about how memory can be glitch-y and dangerous. As Gaustine puts it: "The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells, and fills the freed-up niches with ersatz-memory." An ambitious, quirky, time-folding yarn. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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