‘Time Shelter’ by Georgi Gospodinov (Review – IBP 2023, Number Thirteen)

It’s been almost three weeks since the penultimate leg of this year’s International Booker Prize longlist voyage took us to India, but after a few visa issues, it’s finally time for the last stop of our journey, with today’s post marking the end of our vicarious literary travels.  The final stop is in Bulgaria, where we’ll (fittingly) be taking a look back, with a strong focus on events of the past.  As attractive as wallowing in our memories sounds, though, what happens when we all decide to turn our backs on the future, on a personal and national level?  As we’ll see, that can be a very dangerous endeavour, especially since history has a funny way of repeating itself…

*****
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov
– Weidenfeld & Nicolson, translated by Angela Rodel
(digital review copy courtesy of the American publisher, W.W. Norton)
What’s it all about?
One day, the narrator (basically, Gospodinov himself) bumps into an interesting character in the streets of Vienna, Gaustine, a man with a plan.  The pair catch up again occasionally after that, but it isn’t until the writer tracks his acquaintance down in Zurich that he finds out just what this intriguing figure is up to.  While not a doctor as such, Gaustine has taken it upon himself to provide a kind of haven for people with conditions such as Alzheimer’s, with rooms, and even whole buildings, furnished just as in a specific year.  For those no longer able to face up to the present, this home away from home allows them to give up the struggle and retreat to the comfort of the past.

From humble beginnings, the idea soon spreads, with the clinic expanding and setting up new branches.  Yet ideas like these are hard to control, and things soon get out of hand.  You see, it’s not just the elderly and infirm who might prefer to live in the past, and when Gaustine’s idea is taken up on an international scale, the consequences are considerable.

Clever, inventive and downright funny in parts, Time Shelter sees Gospodinov taking his unusual idea and running with it.  In a work with elements of both speculative and meta-fiction (where Gaustine, apparently the writer’s creation, often has the upper hand), we’re asked to consider the notion of time, the past, and how we should approach it:

That obsolete organ, like some appendix which would otherwise become inflamed, it would throb and ache.  If you can survive without it, better to cut it out and get rid of it; if not, well, then you’d better suck it up.
p.35 (Liveright, 2022)

Those who find themselves lost in time may take a very different view, seeing their past as something warm, comforting, a shelter, perhaps, and what was once urgent and frightening is now merely a stage for old stories.

As the writer works with Gaustine and meets his ‘patients’, slowly pondering the ageing process all the while, a surprisingly melancholy tone creeps into the text.  He reveals his own memory issues, his struggles to recall names, and realises that his best times may be behind him.  He begins to understanding why people might want to escape to the past, a land where everything was better, and those readers of a certain age might feel this strikes a chord (perhaps too well…).

More than the personal, though, it’s the national that moves the plot of Time Shelter along.  As Gaustine remarks:

And believe me, one day, very soon, the majority of people will start returning to the past of their own accord, they’ll start “losing” their memories willingly.  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. (p.44)

His prediction proves to be an accurate one, with whole communities wondering whether it might be better to live in an idealised past than in an uncertain present.  The surreal nature of the book means that what should be mere matter for speculation morphs into something far more surprising as a whole continent ponders the possibility of literally living in the past.

There are no prizes for guessing that there’s a political element to Gospodinov’s work; in effect, Time Shelter acts as a criticism of certain nationalist tendencies, and the unravelling of the European story that had been building since the end of the Second World War, particularly since the fall of the Berlin Wall.  When we forget past struggles, there’s a tendency to paint earlier decades as golden ages, exaggerating the good and diminishing the importance (and pain) of the bad.  Once we get to the wholescale adoption of lost time, it acts as a telling reminder that the past isn’t always as glorious as certain people would have us believe.

I’d tried one Gospodinov book before, the short work The Story Smuggler, and Time Shelter has the same enjoyable style, charming and full of bons mots:

That more or less exhausted the concrete information we exchanged during those five, six days as the seminar wound down.  I remember, of course, several particularly important silences, but I have no way of retelling those. (p.21)

The main ‘narrative’ is punctuated by short ‘extracts’ from Gaustine’s own writing, leaving us to wonder who’s writing who here, and Gospodinov is also prone to scattering literary allusions around, from an early Gabriel García Márquez reference to mentions of Mann, Proust, Borges and, well, I’m sure you can work it out:

Happened stories are all alike, every unhappened story is unhappened in its own way. (p.48)

One thing linking them? Time, naturally, and remembering things past…

Time Shelter is an impressive book in places, an over-the-top exploration of the consequences of living in the past.  If there is a message, it’s that as hard as it can be sometimes, it’s best to keep on looking forwards, working towards change for the better.  Unless, of course, the decision is taken out of your hands – in which case you’re doomed to repeat past mistakes.

Did it deserve to make the shortlist?
It’s definitely among my top six, even if in the end it wasn’t quite what I expected.  There’s a lot of fun to be had with Gospodinov’s inventive tale, but I did feel it fizzled out a little towards the end, and it certainly could have been a little tighter, and shorter.  However, even if there was a little padding here and there, there were also a number of telling and insightful passages scattered among the droll adventures in time, making it an enjoyable read overall.

Why did it make the shortlist?
To be honest, given what we started with, a work of this quality was pretty much guaranteed to make the cut.  One thing that I did notice, however, is the similarities in tone with Whale and Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, with the judges obviously having a penchant for baggy, amusing, satirical novels.  I wonder if that liking will extend all the way to the final announcement…

*****
And there we have it – the end of the road!  I hope you’ve all enjoyed the trip, and discovered a new favourite writer or two along the way.  All that remains now is for the winner(s) to be announced, of course.  The official panel will be revealing their choice to the world on Tuesday, the 23rd of May, and we in the Shadow Panel will be stealing their thunder with our own announcement earlier that same day.  Do join us then to see just what will be crowned best in class for 2023 🙂