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)
Guardian Review
Life behind the iron curtain was an education in a certain kind of humour: dark, unsentimental and absurd. It understood that jokes had become shortcuts to the truth - apart from the bonus of laughter, they turned the wooden language of the regime against itself in ways that sincerity could not. My favourite joke from my time in 1980s Romania was: "Under communism, the future is always certain; it's the past that keeps changing." From the vantage point of 2022, it's clear that this wasn't just true of communism, and that the joke, if we can still bear to laugh at it, is also on us. Time Shelter is Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov's third novel, and for all its focus on the apparently bygone, it could not be more timely. A mysterious therapist, Gaustine, founds a clinic that treats patients with Alzheimer's by recreating the pasts in which they felt most secure. The "past-clinic" begins with different rooms and floors, decorated with a completist's precision and an obsessive's eye for detail: particular cigarette brands, lampshades, wallpaper, archive magazines ¿ Decade by decade, therapeutic time-shelters allow patients to inhabit their temporal "safe spaces". The clinic is not just a place where Gaustine treats patients; it is also the perfect conceit for Gospodinov's narrator to explore the 20th century in Europe through the vanishing points of traumatised or broken individuals. It's as if Oliver Sacks and WG Sebald had collaborated on a Europe-wide chain of treatment centres. A former secret policeman arrives with his former quarry, who now has dementia. The police officer has become his prosthetic memory, restoring moments of happiness to the man he once persecuted and informed on. In one of the book's many dark jokes, a Romanian patient finds solace in remembering not what he experienced but what he fantasised about: a life in the US. Nostalgia is not about what you had, but a memory of what you wanted: a backdated cheque from a nonexistent bank that somehow always pays out. Some patients have memories that are better left untapped: in one harrowing case, Gaustine treats a woman who cannot bear to be near showers. He discovers that she is a Holocaust survivor, prompting him to reflect that memory is not a good in itself, and that the right kind of forgetting is also therapeutically necessary. Gaustine writes that the more past there is, the less memory we have. Differentiating the past from memory becomes important later in the novel, when Gaustine's idea is hijacked - as it was always going to be - by politicians. The clinic is so successful that clients with no ailments gravitate towards it. Everyone wants a piece of the past. A radio station plays entire days from specific decades. Gaustine imagines towns and cities fixed in particular eras; soon, whole countries want to emulate his idea. Across Europe, political parties promote different decades in their national histories. Referendums are fought on what particular past a country's future will look like. It's funny and absurd, but it's also frightening, because even as Gospodinov plays with the idea as fiction, the reader begins to recognise something rather closer to home. Time Shelter was written between the Brexit referendum and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, both of which represent, in their own ways, the weaponisation of nostalgia and the selection of particular eras in the time clinic of the not-so-new world order. The Brexit referendum is invoked here as a prototype (our politicians would say "world-leading") for the fictional referendums that break out across Europe. In the film that I hope will be made of this novel, I imagine crowd scenes and political rallies with people chanting slogans like, "What do we want? Then! When do we want it? Now!" True to form, Gospodinov finds humour in the bleakness, as Europe proves, yet again, that knowing history is no bar to repeating it. He has fun with national stereotypes: "If Scandinavia couldn't decide which of its happy periods to choose, Romania was also racked by doubt, but for opposite reasons." This novel could have been a clever, high-concept intellectual game with little by way of emotional investment, but Gospodinov is a writer of great warmth as well as skill. His narrator bears close relation to Gospodinov himself: a Bulgarian, born in 1968, for whom the end of communism remains, as it remains in a ghostly way in this novel, a meeting point of past and present. His affection for that period is sincere but also without illusion. He can draw out fully dimensional characters from the broken details of their fractured memories. His transitions - between humour and sadness, absurd situationism and reverberating tragedy, pathos and ironic observation - are never obtrusive. Thanks to the skill and delicacy of Angela Rodel's translation, these qualities are in abundant display for the anglophone reader. The novel's title - Time Shelter - is a neologism in Bulgarian as it is in English, a grafting from the noun "bomb shelter". It's well found in its ambiguity: sheltering from time, and sheltering within time. Both are attractive but impossible. Nostalgia used to feel like a source of harmless escape, and occasional sustenance. It is starting to seem like a fossil fuel, foreshortening our future as it burns.
Kirkus 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.
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.