Earlier this year, when reviewing my inbox, I was halfway convinced that I’d somehow been transported back to the early 1990s. That which had convinced me of this unexpected trip in time was, all things considered, relatively innocuous: a series of emails touting deluxe reissues of a series of albums by cult bands whose heyday had been — I shudder to type this — 30 years ago.
That’s the trouble with embracing all things retro, though — sometimes it doesn’t stop there. A new edition of a beloved album, movie, or book can feel like a reunion with an old friend. And if that was all there was to aspects of the past making beachheads in the present, it would be fantastic. But if recent years have taught us anything, it’s that it isn’t only the positive things that arise in the present day. From reactionary Supreme Court verdicts to resurgent nationalist and fascist ideologies, the influence of the bad old days can be pernicious and enduring.
Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter — translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel — deftly addresses this very concern: at what point does nostalgia curdle into something terrible? That thematic concern is one of the most compelling elements of this novel, but it isn’t the only one. Time Shelter also has both metafictional and speculative elements, and it ties in with some of Gospodinov’s ongoing concerns. And for a novel that’s intricately enmeshed with European history, it also feels deeply relevant to the situation the United States finds itself in circa 2022.
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“No one has yet thought up a gas mask and bomb shelter that protect against time.” That’s Gospodinov in an earlier novel, The Physics of Sorrow (2011), which appeared in an English translation (also by Rodel) in 2015. Ascribing a tactile quality to time is something that recurs in Time Shelter, as well as the character of Gaustine, who is glimpsed in a handful of fragments in that earlier novel. (In a 2017 interview with Music & Literature, Gospodinov recalled creating him. “I wanted to begin a poem with an epigraph that I did not want to sign myself, so I had to make up a character and came up with Gaustine, a troubadour from the thirteenth century,” he said.) And early on in his latest novel, there’s a pair of lines that resonates deeply with that earlier sentence from The Physics of Sorrow: “We need to be ready with the bomb shelter of the past. Call it the time shelter, if you will.”
The central concept of Time Shelter feels deeply rooted in reality. Gospodinov writes about the idea of people with dementia living in a facility that echoes their own past — something that has its roots in reality. In this novel, Gaustine is involved with the operation of this kind of facility, with the narrator assisting him and describing his methodology:
“For those who have lost their memories, this door has slammed shut once and for all. For them, the present is a foreign country, while the past is their homeland. The only thing we can do is create a space that is in sync with their internal time. If it’s 1965 in your head, Gaustine said, the year when you were twenty and you lived in a rented attic in Paris, Krakow, or behind Sofia University, then let the outside world, at least in the confines of a single room, be 1965, too.”
Over the course of the novel, these spaces become more and more ornate, expanding beyond the boundaries of realism and into something much more sprawling. (Fans of the film Synecdoche, New York will find a lot to like here, I suspect.)
Had Gospodinov stayed in this mode throughout the novel, he likely would have had all he needed for a compelling work of fiction. About a third of the way into the book, the narrator encounters a patient known as “the Runner.” The Runner has been living through a very particular period of time when he suddenly has a flash from what he believes to be the future:
“Once he came and found me in the beginning of the night. He shut the door behind him but didn’t want to sit down. John Lennon will be killed, he said quickly. Very soon. He was truly worried, in any case he couldn’t explain whether he had dreamed it or not. Some crazy guy will shoot him, I’ve even seen his face.”
Eventually, the Runner escapes and ventures out to notify the authorities. When he returns, he believes he has witnessed people “being subjected to an experiment.” Or, as the Runner himself phrases it, “They were playing out the future, if you can believe it, guys.” That sense of temporal dislocation atop temporal dislocation recalls a remark made by the writer William Gibson: “The future has arrived — it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”
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But surreal vignettes from a memory care facility aren’t all that Gospodinov is going after here. “[Gaustine] was no longer satisfied by his clinic with its rooms and floors, those campuses from various decades that were growing and multiplying were not enough,” the narrator writes. “I imagined one day whole cities would change their calendar and go back several decades.” And in a few more sentences, the novel’s first part concludes; in the second, the past begins to infect more and more people around the world “like the Justinian plague or the Spanish flu.”
Later, the narrator puts it somewhat differently: “A new life was beginning, life as a reenactment.” Numerous stylistically and ideologically disparate works of nonfiction have been written about nostalgia and stagnation, from Simon Reynolds’s Retromania to Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society; that one sentence of Gospodinov’s may prove to be the inspiration for countless more.
It doesn’t take much time before Gospodinov is making explicit the connection between this all-encompassing revisitation of the past and a violent strain of nationalism:
“The past was rising up everywhere, filling with blood and coming to life. A radical move was needed, something unexpected and prescient, which would stop this irresistible centrifugal force. The time for love had ended, now came the time for hate.”
Gradually, this becomes the state of the world, and Gospodinov explores more and more facets of it, including how Bulgaria has reacted to this new status quo and what decade various nations opt to establish as their own moment in time to revisit. It’s here that this novel loses some of its momentum; The Physics of Sorrow had a number of sections in which Gospodinov set off long stretches of comparisons, and that mode makes a return in Time Shelter.
Even with slightly diminished force, the impact of Time Shelter’s closing pages — which sees history repeating itself in awful, impossible ways — is great. Gospodinov’s novel features a stylized, surreal vision of cause and effect, but it also illustrates the way in which these devices can lead to a deeper understanding of the present moment. This is in no way a work of realism in the traditional sense, yet it seems as accurate a take on the state of the world as you’re liable to get right now.
[Published by Liveright on May 10, 2022, 304 pages, $27.00 hardcover]