2023/167: Time Shelter — Georgi Gospodinov (translated by Angela Rodel)

...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. [loc. 592]

The first ever Bulgarian winner of the International Booker Prize, Time Shelter deals with nostalgia (in a very different, and much more European, way to Prophet) and features a character who, to a veteran reader of science fiction, appears to be a time traveller. Gaustine, who the narrator isn't sure whether he invented, is 'equally at home in all times'; writes letters to the narrator as if from 1939; and '[jumps] from decade to decade just as we change planes at an airport'. Whether this is time travel or delusion or a kind of performative outsider-ness is never explained.

The novel starts with Gaustine creating a clinic in Zurich for sufferers of Alzheimers, who often seem to live (or want to live) in the past. Each floor of the clinic recreates a different decade, lovingly and meticulously recreated: brands of cigarettes, copies of magazines, the colour of the wallpaper. The clinic proves extremely popular, not only with the patients but with their families. More clinics open, and eventually a referendum is held, in which each European country decides which decade of the twentieth century they will live in. 'There was something romantically doomed about such a referendum, especially given the recent fiasco with Brexit ...' (Britain is not allowed to participate, not being part of the EU any more.)

Much of the rest of the novel concerns the political, artistic and economic movements trying to influence referendum results in various countries, with an understandable emphasis on Bulgaria, where the rival factions favour the 1920s (the Heroes) and the 1970s (the Socs). More generally, the Seventies and Eighties prove most popular, with only Italy voting for the Sixties. Meanwhile our narrator bemoans what is lost, fears what might be to come, and wonders whether Lot's wife -- turned to salt as she looked back -- was the Angel of History.

I felt my literary credentials shrivelling as I read this. I loved the narrator's cultural milieu, his quotations of Auden and the Doors, his appreciation of the tumultous past of Europe. But I became lost in the increasing fragmentation -- of the novel's structure, and of the world, and of the narrator's identity -- towards the end of the novel. And I'm not sure that even in this weird nostalgia-shaped Europe a historical reenactment would lead to World War 3.

From the author's afterword:

For a person who loves the world of yesterday, this book was not easy. To a certain extent it was a farewell to a dream of the past, or rather to that which some are trying to turn the past into. To a certain extent it was also a farewell to the future.