Escape from the Present

Opening the television to watch the news or simply peruse one’s social media accounts to be updated with current affairs can be upsetting and, at times frustrating. Media outlets have become proliferated with adverse news. News such as powerful countries invading powerless ones, men in power sexually abusing women, politicians shirking responsibilities and accountability, or men and women being homophobic or racist toward their fellow has become ubiquitous. Everywhere are marks of senseless violence. Men against men. Fellow against fellow. Nation against nation. These are realities that have become the norm of the contemporary. Our current realities are brimming with complexities beyond our imagination. These different factors created a pandemonium.

Living in this hodgepodge of reality makes most of us yearn for tranquility, a semblance of peace. We seek an escape, of any form, from the chaos that surrounds us. Can we be blamed for doing this, for wanting inner peace? Having a peace of mind amidst this time of different crises is a luxury. It does not help that being a citizen of the virtual world has become toxic. What was once envisioned as a tool for reaching other parts of the world – and it was, at the onset – has been weaponized into a tool for the proliferation of negative propaganda and fake news. Social media has become a forum for heated debates, bashing, and basically pulling each other down. We argue behind the comforts and safety of our monitors. It has become mentally and physically draining to exist in the present.

In Bulgarian poet, writer, and playwright Georgi Gospodinov’s latest novel, Time Shelter, those who want to escape from the pandemonium of the present resort to nostalgia. In traveling back to the past, they hope to find even a semblance of happiness. Originally published in Bulgarian in 2020 Времеубежище (romanized: Vremeubezhishte), the book’s English translation by Angela Rodel was released in 2022. Before his third novel, Gospodinov already established a remarkable and highly-heralded oeuvre that earned him accolades from various parts of the world. Time Shelter consolidated his status as one of the contemporary’s most innovative writers. The novel’s Italian translation won Gospodinov the 2021 Strega European Prize. Two years later, Time Shelter became the first Bulgarian-language novel to win the esteemed International Booker Prize.

“I’m getting old. Exiled ever further from the Rome of childhood in the distant empty provinces of old age, from which there is no return. And Rome no longer answers my letters. Somewhere the past exists as a house or a street that you’ve left for a short while, for five minutes, and you’ve found yourself in a strange city. 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.”

~ Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

Narrating the Time Shelter was an anonymous character. As the story moves forward, and through textual hints, one can surmise that the narrator is an avatar of Gospodinov himself as the traits of the author emerge in the narrator. The narrator originated from a small town at the foothills of the Balkan Mountains and had the initials G.G. or Gerry to his fellow Bulgarians. The narrator’s gaze followed the story of a man named Gaustine, a man described as an “invisible friend, more real and visible than my very self.” The narrator and Gaustine’s paths first crossed at a seaside literary seminar in early September 1989. The narrator found Gaustine an intriguing character, hence, they kept their lines of communication open after their initial encounter. The narrator’s interest in Gaustine was further piqued after he tracked down an acquaintance in Zurich. Through this acquaintance, he learned about what Gaustine has been up to.

A therapist with a plan, Gaustine founded a clinic in Zurich dedicated to treating patients who were losing their memories or losing themselves in the sea of their memories. Essentially, the clinic was set up to cater to individuals afflicted with Alzheimer’s syndrome. Gaustine’s clinic, however, was no typical clinic providing conventional treatments. Each room and each floor of the clinic, and even whole buildings comprising it, were tailor-made to recreate a specific year and a decade in 20th-century Europe. Each room, to its minutest details, was intricately designed to evoke these time periods. Careful and full attention was paid to the details of these rooms, from decorations, color schemes, cigarette brands, archive magazines, pieces of furniture, and other distinguishing characteristics of the different eras.

Each room was personalized to each patient’s requirement, with the ultimate goal of transporting the patients to the past, thus, allowing them to revisit and find comfort in their memories. When the narrator got wind of Gaustine’s concept, he was astounded, ultimately deciding to help Gaustine by working as his assistant. As Gaustine’s assistant, he was tasked with collecting artifacts from the past. In essence, he became a “collector of the past”, traveling across Europe to pick up not only memorabilia of the past but also archives of impressions, sights, sounds, and scents. These details will further enrich the clinic’s rooms. Gaustine’s goal, after all, was to provide a home away from home that completely recreates the patient’s past. It was not simply to relive the past but to be in the past.

The rooms, or the titular time shelters, did not only provide relief to the patients. Observed from a different lens, the novel was a means to probe 20th-century Europe through the fading memories of the clinic’s patients. We read about important historical events, including the Holocaust, the rise of Vladimir Lenin, the development of student activism in the 1960s, and even the more recent Brexit referendum. Each event was seminal in shaping the continent. Details of popular culture, such as the Beatles and the Volkswagen, further provided mirrors of time, the novel’s single most important element. One character, for instance, had his room decked up in the style of the 1960s because of his love for the Beatles. These details also served as hallmarks of collective and individual time.

“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.”

~ Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

It didn’t take long for the simple concept to start taking flight. One clinic became two, then three, as Gaustine started opening more branches, including one in Gospodinov’s native Bulgaria, to cater to the growing demand. The demand was not just driven by actual Alzheimer’s patients and the infirm but also by clients with no ailments who started flocking to Gaustine’s clinics. These healthy individuals brought with them their families. They wanted to seek refuge in the past as the realities of the present were slowly becoming too much to bear. It seemed like everyone wanted a piece of the past, so much so that radio stations even started playing music from specific eras for days. Time and memory have both become consumables, with Gaustine as the catalyst. As his experiment started gaining more traction, Gaustine also started dreaming big, conceptualizing whole towns and cities as representatives of particular eras.

As nostalgia sweeps the narrative, it is palpable that time and memory are the mantles upon which the story was laid. Memory is familiar territory in literature – Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time/Remembrance of Things Past is a hallmark of in the ambit of literature – but Gospodinov added his own take on this familiar subject. He pushed the literary envelope by integrating elements of metafiction and speculative fiction, weaving them together into a lush tapestry. The story coaxes readers to ponder on the notion and nature of time. The novel pushes readers to contemplate how we should approach the past concerning both individual and collective memories. Time, after all, is ephemeral, with Gospodinov asserting that “there is no time machine except the human being.” Interestingly, this line is one of the many ironies astutely woven into the story.

The air is currently pregnant with the appeal to nostalgia. As the future remains wrapped up in a veil of uncertainties and the present descends into pandemonium, most of us start finding comfort in the certainties of the past. There is, however, danger lurking in the appeal to sentimentality and nostalgia. They are double-edged swords as reimagined history is being weaponized by politicians. They use it to rally nationalists into a sense of national identity. The appeal to reactionary sentiments is indelible in the fine print of the Brexit referendum and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. However, this is a phenomenon not entirely endemic to Europe. Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) rhetoric is a prevalent example. Elsewhere, many cling to the idea of a “golden age.” Dominican Republic’s Trujillistas, for instance, yearn for a semblance of the regime of their fallen dictator, notwithstanding the atrocities perpetrated by the populist leader and his ilk.

With its scathing but subtly veiled but timely commentaries, one can easily glean the political nature of the novel. Time Shelter was laced with humor which was, oftentimes, dark and even ironic. A fine example was a Romanian patient whose sanctuary was his reminiscences of life in the United States. The catch was that it was all figments of his imagination, a life he once fantasized about. Another case was of a Bulgarian secret agent, Mr. N, who arrived at one of the clinics, carrying with him the man he previously interrogated and even persecuted. As Mr. N endeavored to resuscitate his former ward’s happy memories, he effectively and ironically transformed into a surrogate memory of the man whose life was once at his mercy. Elsewhere, death and decay were tackled, contrasted by cultural references. Familiar literary titles such as Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain – Mann was a great influence on Gospodinov’s own writing – Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk.

“Soon after that we would go our separate ways, grow cold, forget one another, the rebels would grow tame as teaching assistants in the universities, the sworn bachelors and party animals would be pushing baby carriages and zoning out in front of their TV, the hippies would get regular haircuts at the local barbershop.”

~ Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter

The alarm started to sound even louder when the rest of the European continent wanted a piece of Gaustine’s idea. They envisioned moving back rather than moving forward. The continent seemed to be afflicted with collective dementia. A wave of reminiscence prompted nations to want to turn villages and towns into clinics of past decades. They were effectively turning Gaustine’s vision into reality; at one point, Gaustine’s assistant started to ponder on Gaustine’s ambitiousness and the consequences attached to it. However, as nations scrambled to return to the past, an important question emerged: what era should they return to or inhabit? Who would have thought that going to the past could be as complicated as living in the present or envisioning the future?

The memories of happier times resulted in the denizens of the continent hosting their own referendums. They voted for which decade they should return to. A roughly drawn map that charted the results of these referendums provided comic relief as the results and the rationales behind these results were as diverse and interesting as they were arbitrary. The image was abstract. This further underlined Time Shelter’s quality of being a novel of ideas; Gospodinov made up for the novel’s lack of a robust plot. Gaustine was also the product of this innovation. Named after Saint Augustine who was known for saying that time was subjective and that God lived outside of time, was wrapped in a veil of enigma, Gaustine inhabited the seams of time, living ubiquitously across different periods simultaneously.

Nostalgia has provided a sanctuary from the tumult of the present, not only in Europe but all over the world. We yearn to return to a past where our happy memories lie. However, nostalgia is a double-edged sword, as iterated in Gospodinov’s third novel. Time Shelter is a multilayered novel that integrates satire, philosophy, and metafiction into a potent and inventive novel of ideas. The result was a lush tapestry that dealt with the question of whether our past, both collective and individual, can provide us a sanctuary from the tedium of our quotidian lives. It veers off from reality but Gospodinov makes it sound plausible. Gospodinov’s foray ode to the past came with a deeper message which was encapsulated in this line: “The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells and fills the freed-up niches with ersatz memory.” Time Shelter may meander but the timeliness of its message made it a compelling read deserving of all the accolades it received.

“No time belongs to you, no place is your own. What you are looking for is not looking for you, that which you are dreaming about is not dreaming about you. You know that something was yours in a different place and in a different time, that’s why you’re always crisscrossing past rooms and days. But if you are in the right plae, the time is different. And if you are in the right time, the places is different. Incurable.”

~ Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter
Book Specs

Author: Georgi Gospodinov
Translator (from Bulgarian): Angela Rodel
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Publishing Date: 2022 (April 29, 2020)
Number of Pages: 302
Genre: Literary, Science Fiction

Synopsis

In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time.

But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’ hoping to escape from the horrors of our present – a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.

About the Author

Georgi Gospodinov Georgiev (Bulgarian: Георги Господинов Георгиев) was born on January 7, 1968 in Yambol, Bulgaria. Gospodinov’s literary career started in the 1990s when he published two collections of poetry:  Lapidarium (Лапидариум, 1992) and The Cherry of a People (Черешата на един народ, 1996). His poetry garnered him national literary prizes. In 1996, he published his first novel, Естествен роман which was translated into English in 2005 as Natural Novel.

His transition to prose continued with the publication of И други истории (And Other Stories), a collection of short stories, in 2001. His sophomore novel,  Физика на тъгата, was published in 2012 and translated into English in 2015 as The Physics of Sorrow. It won Gospodinoe won the Bulgarian National Award for Best Novel of the Year 2013. It also elevated him to global acclaim as the book won the Jan Michalski Prize and the Angelus Award and was also a finalist for the 2014 Strega European Prize and the 2016 American PEN Translation Prize. His third novel, Времеубежище, was published in 2020 and translated into English in 2022 as Time Shelter. The book further elevated Gospodinov to global acclaim. The book won the 2021 Strega European Prize and the 2023 International Booker Prize.

Gospodinov’s oeuvre also includes works of nonfiction, a graphic novel The Eternal Fly, and theater plays. He also wrote screenplays for short feature films.  His screenplay for Omelette received an Honorable Mention at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Blind Vaysha, a short animation based on his short story of the same name was nominated for the 2017 Academy Award (Oscar). From January to June 2019, Gospodinov was writer-in-residence of the Literaturhaus Zurich and the PWG Foundation in Zurich. He is an associate professor at the Institute for Literature, BAS, Sofia, and teaches creative writing, media, and literature courses at Sofia University. He was awarded several fellowships among which at the Cullman Center (NYPL) and at the Wissenschaftskolleg (Berlin).