The protagonist of the novel Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel (Liveright May, 2022), call him Ishmael
if you will, reads a newspaper article describing a geriatrics doctor who
“decked out his office in the style of the ’60s,” complete with a gramophone
and a poster of the famous Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover. The
doctor noted, the article said, that when visiting his office, patients with
memory issues "became more talkative, in other words, they felt at
home."
“That was my idea,” claims the protagonist, a writer of fiction.
“I’ve had it in my head for years, but clearly somebody beat me to it.” He
envisions a story in which he meets a fictional geriatrics doctor named Gaustine,
creating with him a “clinic for the past” for patients suffering from memory
loss. Rooms are prepared with scents and settings from different decades
providing relief for the varied memory ailments from which the patients
suffered.
The author takes this concept to a larger scale. As detailed in the
next part of the novel, memories of better times lead European citizens across
the continent to hold referendums in which they vote to which past they should
return in order to solve their nation’s particular woes in the present day.
After considering the results of these national referendums, the
protagonist returns to the homeland of his own past, Bulgaria. Seeing a giant
Bulgarian flag pulled by 300 drones across the sky; watching a thundering horo
dance; and smelling the scent of roasted peppers at dusk; all provide him with
an opportunity to place his visions of fictitious Gaustine into perspective.
At times satirical, at others philosophical, the novel Time
Shelter is written in Gospodinov’s unique “anarchic and experimental”
style, as The New Yorker described his debut book, Natural Novel. Time
Shelter is not as fragmented as the author’s second novel, The Physics
of Sorrow, but its non-linear plot may not appeal to all readers.
The underlying theme in Time Shelter is whether our memories of the
past, real or imagined, can protect us from the temporal chaos outside our
daily lives. In real life, memories may not shield us from that chaos, but in
the imagination of Georgi Gospodinov, anything is possible.
Originally published in World Literature Today.
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