On Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov
"The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined."
I love a good book prize, which is why when Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel, was announced as the winner of the 2023 International Booker Prize on May 23rd, I already had two copies on hand. This year the longlist was particularly interesting, with 12 different countries and 11 different languages represented; three of those languages had never appeared on previous longlists, and three of the authors had never had any of their works translated into English before. Time Shelter is the first book originally written in Bulgarian to win the prize in its 17-year history.
When the longlist was first announced, it was actually pretty difficult to find a copy of the book, and I saw quite a lot of buzz about it online. On the Booker Prizes’ Instagram post one day before the ceremony asking who their followers were backing to win, Time Shelter dominates the comments section. When you read the premise, it’s easy to see why people were so enamoured: an imagined clinic of the past, in which each floor represents a different period of history down to the most minute details, like reprinted daily newspapers and brands of cigarettes. Our narrator becomes a devotee of the clinic’s founder, the enigmatic Gaustine, who aims to uncover through immersion long-buried memories in the minds of elderly people suffering from memory loss disorders, like dementia and Alzheimer’s. The clinic ends up seeing such success that the general public start to visit, and this situation escalates to the point that referendums are held in each European Union member state to decide what era of history the citizens of the countries would like to return to. It’s imaginative, timely and deals with some big ideas around politics and memory, both collective and individual.
The idea of the clinic is what really drew me in, this place that people can “return” to despite never having set foot in the building before. There is some explanation of the process of finding authentic objects to furnish the settings - shag comforters, Mickey Mouse alarm clocks, squat Phillips TVs and shiny Olivetti typewriters, tinfoil-wrapped chocolates decades past their expiry. Gaustine reckons with the difficulty of creating just one room for all of the ’60s, how not everyone had the same items or experienced the same economic circumstances, necessitating multiple different iterations of the same bedroom, living room, kitchen. The scale of the project is daunting; in reality, for this type of thing to work, the process would be unimaginably costly and time-consuming. The day-to-day goings-on in the clinic, the financial and practical implications, don’t really get much of a mention - as a reader, you must suspend your disbelief a little bit here, and for me that was easy, because in many ways I so wanted this to be real.
There is no consensus on how to deal with the confusion of someone who has dementia, who believes that they are living in an alternate reality, that they are younger than they are or that their life hasn’t materially changed from a certain arbitrary point in the past. Many will forget key milestones in their life, such as the death of a partner or other close family member - and what do you say to someone when they are wondering when their husband will be home, that man who died ten years previously? What do you do when your eighty-year-old mother hasn’t eaten all day, because she’s waiting for her own mother to make her breakfast? In the past, the advice was for the caregiver to “ground” the patient, to seize them by the shoulders and yank them back into reality. Nowadays we are starting to wonder if that’s the right thing to do. When you can’t remember what has happened from one moment to the next, what’s the harm in believing that your husband has just popped to the shops, and oh, yes, I suppose he has been gone a while but you know what he’s like, he’s probably chatting away to the shopkeeper again, I’m sure he’ll be back soon. How can that be any more cruel than revealing that crushing reality over and over again, breaking the news that no, Mum, Dad’s been dead for years, and you’ve just forgotten it, that most devastating and life-changing event? Gaustine’s approach to memory loss is to comfort, to validate, to seize on what the patient does remember and allow them to enter those memories. For the person to whom the present is frightening and incomprehensible, the past is a sanctuary that the clinic offers to them.
The book also emphasises the profound loss of identity that comes with dementia. One of the anecdotes from the early chapters of the novel is about a patient at the clinic called Mr. N, who has forgotten almost everything about his life and himself. He is completely alone in the world, with no one to remind him of his identity, provoking the heartbreaking line: “If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?” It turns out that under the Soviet Union, unbeknownst to him, he had been followed by a secret agent who had made notes on his movements during his day-to-day life. When the agent agrees to come and talk to him, he admits that he had to invent a lot of details for his reports because nothing much was really happening; Mr. N almost feels apologetic that his life had been so boring that the agent couldn’t think of anything to write about. At the same time, it is the mundane details of his life that he is desperate to retrieve - as Gaustine says later, “Time doesn’t nest in the unusual, it seeks a quiet, peaceful place. If you discover traces of another time, it will be during some unremarkable afternoon.” According to the agent, a young woman would often visit Mr. N in his younger years, but he cannot remember anything of it. Even so, knowing this is a comfort to him: “…if there had been someone who loved him, this meant that he had existed after all, even if he doesn’t remember much of himself.” It is those that witnessed your life that validate your existence, those people who knew you better than you now know yourself; to lose those people, and then to lose your own memory, is to lose yourself. Our narrator experiences this later, after the death of his father: “Now the last person who remembers me as a child is gone, I told myself. And only then did I burst into sobs, like a child.”
In the same way, the person that you believe yourself to be, the identity that you have built up in your mind, is not necessarily the perception that others will have of you. Gospodinov writes beautifully on this subject, with choppy prose mimicking a collection of contradictory observations from people who knew the narrator during his life, both physical descriptions, as if misremembered: “Skinny, super skinny… You got to be pretty heavy… I was always asking you not to walk so fast… You limped… Tall… Hunched over…”, and personality judgements, highlighting the complexity that can be contained within one person: “…Well, you were always laughing… You were antisocial, sometimes you’d go days without saying anything… […] Spaced out, very spaced out… A person who never wasted any time…”. This is followed by the question, physically small but philosophically large: “Is all of that me?”
And that is what is at the centre of this story: questions. What if you could go back, reverse time? Maybe I can’t return to the past, but can I bring it closer to me? Can I reinvoke those feelings I had then, to bring me closer to the person I was? And what is it about the present that makes the past so appealing, that encourages us to return to its rituals? This is what is considered in the second half of the novel, after the clinic has become famous and provoked nations to decide via referendum what eras of the past they should turn back to. The novel does not lose its sentimentality here, but it does take on a more satirical tone, as our narrator returns to his native Bulgaria after spending many years in Switzerland, hoping to understand the public sentiment in the run-up to the referendum. Two main factions emerge: those that advocate a return to the Soviet era, and those that seek to go even further back, to an undetermined era of Bulgarian greatness around the time of the April Uprising of 1876 (interestingly, the uprising failed but was apparently mythologised in Bulgarian culture as a symbol of national greatness - parallels with the American Civil War perhaps?). Here Gospodinov considers two options that form the basis of ideologies across the political spectrum today: that things were better in the (somewhat) recent past, a kind of agreed cultural forgetting facilitated by some distance from the event; or, conversely, that things were better at some obscure point in history, too far back for anyone alive today to remember but preserved in some cultural traditions that are now falling into disuse. The latter, a mythology often favoured by the populist right in English-speaking countries, has weaker foundations but is harder to disprove by virtue of lack of first-hand accounts (and the ability of its proponents to question the validity of historical documents testifying to the poor conditions and quality of life experienced by certain sections of the population at the time). The former is based primarily in a kind of cultural amnesia - there are people alive today who remember the repression of the Soviet era and who experienced it first hand, after all - but also in a feeling, the thread of which runs through the whole novel: the comfort blanket that is familiarity.
Familiarity is the driving force - in the same way that a traumatised person will return to patterns and relationships that mimic their upbringing, a traumatised nation will fall back on the very systems that traumatised its people. What is familiar is sometimes more desirable than what is better - in one scene that takes place at the clinic, a patient is moved by the taste of factory-made bread sprinkled with salt; of course, there are objectively more tasty things to eat, but it is a reminder of her childhood and that is why she savours it. On a grander scale, to imagine a new utopia, a revolutionary system that has never been tried, is infinitely more frightening and risky than to look back at the past and wonder: was it really all that bad? This is informed primarily by a disconnect from the present, of course, as citizens of a country look around, bewildered, recognising nothing, and retreat into memory instead. As Gospodinov writes towards the end of the book, “It’s been written that the past is a foreign country. Nonsense. The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country, full of strange faces, I won’t set foot there.” Here the central metaphor of the book is realised: nation as dementia patient, attracted by the allure of the past, of the mythology that justifies and enables its existence. Indeed, what is a nation except a shared past, an identity shaped by collective memory? Unsurprising, then, that faced with a loss of identity, facilitated by globalisation and freedom of movement, countries turn to tradition - to the past - to shape and rebuild their national identities, with nostalgia as their guide.
None of what I’m saying is new, and I’m far from the first or the most eloquent to take note of it. It is Gospodinov’s innovative and imaginative writing that gives these ideas a freshness, a new spin. The Times called the book “a novel of ideas”, and that description is perfect; it reckons with memory on both large and small scales, with an intelligence and thoughtfulness that is almost touching. It is definitely not an action-packed story, leaning heavily on meditations and analysis, but for me even the prose is enough to marvel at, beautifully and seamlessly conveyed by Angela Rodel. My hope is that perhaps winning this prize will encourage English publishers to reissue Gospodinov’s previous work, and to give it the wider audience I’m sure it deserves.