WHEN TIMES COLLIDE
In Georgi Gospodinov's latest novel, the past intervenes in the future until all the lines are blurred. The present is in chaos and the future is almost certainly nebulous.
I had said last week that I intended to finish reading the second half of an enormous Japanese book called I AM A CAT. Alas, I happened upon the announcement of the 2023 long list for the International Booker. That did me in. The rest of the cat soliloquy will simply have to wait even though I enjoyed the first section so much last week. On the Booker longlist this year was a novel by a celebrated Bulgarian author and I was luckily the first one at my local library to get my hands on it.
TIME SHELTER by Georgi Gospodinov offers up the possibilities of returning to a golden age in our lives. By the time I turned over the last page of this book, nothing seemed real or worthwhile. The protagonist, I discovered soon enough, was merely a figment of the narrator’s imagination; the narrator himself seemed addled and unreliable by the end. I felt dizzy as I closed the book. Through it all, however, the author’s message rose into sharp resonance: The only great thing about the past is our memory of it.
As the novel opens we see Gaustine, a geriatric psychiatrist also called Dr. G, who is a mysterious acquaintance of the narrator’s. Gaustine opens a dementia clinic in Zurich, Switzerland. He and the narrator exchange several missives in which they pretend they’re writing to each other in the year 1939. After a few such letters, our narrator is rattled by the experience. Whether in the years past or in the present, Gaustine isn’t really one of us, the narrator reveals.
He seemed endlessly lonely and…unbelonging. That was the word that came to me then. Unbelonging to anything in the world, or more precisely to the modern world.
Dr. G goes on to fame and fortune and his clinics become “time shelters” for those discombobulated by their lives in the present. He offers treatment for patients with Alzheimer’s by recreating the pasts in which they once felt at home. Imagine these odd clinics—a sort of throwback to an IKEA showroom of the present—that replicate entire decades from the past.
You opened the door and fell directly into the middle of the ‘60s. The entryway with the classic coatrack-and-bench ensemble, dark green, made of fake leather with brass studs. We had one like it at home.
Welcome to the ‘60s, Gaustine smiled observing my shock in the entryway to the decade with a furtive smirk. I didn’t want to leave this transfiguration just yet and immediately turned toward the kids’ room. Two twin beds along the walls, each covered by a yellow shag comforter made of some fake fiber (we called it ledeka back then, it must’ve been an abbreviation) with a brown chest between them, the two beds meeting perpendicularly at the chest. I glanced at Gaustine, he understood and nodded, and I threw myself down on the bed, just as I was, in my jacket, shoes, and fifty-year-old body, and landed in my eight-year-old body amid the tickling fringe of the comforter….
Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, TIME SHELTER is yet another Dystopian novel from Georgi Gospodinov. According to this story in The New Yorker, this author’s works embody a certain sorrow with which people in Bulgaria seem to identify. Reading this reminded me right away of Orhan Pamuk and my experience reading ISTANBUL two weeks ago. Like Pamuk’s Istanbul, Gospodinov’s Bulgaria, too, is a receptacle for a typical despair that, according to him, all Bulgarians feel. Like Istanbul’s hüzün, it’s “the eternal sorrow and misfortune of being Bulgarian, a topic ripe for filling any awkward lull in the conversation.”
This book cautions us all about nostalgia. It can be shaky territory, especially when we are in denial about our place in the present. The past always looks glorious because we view it through glasses colored by the struggles of our present. I’m certainly intrigued with this whole idea of living in the past because the older I get, the more I too seem to want to return to a beautiful past which, ironically, seemed ugly and disconcerting when I was living my life inside it.
TIME SHELTER asks many profound questions of our lives that I’ve never thought of asking myself before. Consider, for a start, some of the questions Gospodinov brings up through the course of his exercise:
When does the everyday become history?
We assume that the memory of happiness is a happy memory but who knows?
Can the past be resurrected or re-member-ed again? Should it be?
And how much past can a person bear?
In the New Yorker story I’ve linked to above, the writer alludes to this “Bulgarian Sadness of Georgi Gospodinov” and says that Gospodinov’s “tuga” is a longing for something that hasn’t happened… a sudden realization that life is slipping away and that certain things will never happen to you, for a whole list of reasons—personal, geographical, political.” At the ripe old age of 61, I could, literally, hear the roar of an (absent) avalanche in Saratoga upon reading those lines. How many of us haven’t felt this feeling (lying almost like a stone in our bellies) on some days?
It’s clear that this “tuga” isn’t unique to Bulgaria. In Gospodinov’s novel this feeling ultimately overwhelms Europe. TIME SHELTER references Brexit and Bulgaria’s own tortuous history (under the Ottoman Empire and communist leadership) and every reader of this book will no doubt draw similarities to the politics of their nations. The past is hardly innocuous as we know only too well in America. During Trump’s four years in office and in the aftermath of the Trump presidency, we’ve seen vast swathes of America returning to an ugly period in the past.
The past can do good in small doses. In the novel, Dr. G’s experiment has wondrous results in his patients. They begin to open up with family members. Everyone see the results of such therapy. Soon, Dr. G opens up his clinics to his patient’s families and friends. Over time, he wonders why there cannot be entire neighborhoods, and whole cities even, based on this concept of a return to life in a certain year which embodied hope for a good life.
Unfortunately, as he scales up, Dr. G and the narrator begin to realize the weaknesses of Gaustine’s idea. Dr. G’s experiment goes awry just as secrets seep through walls and viruses leak out of labs. Somehow, somewhere, real life intervenes and the future collides into the past. An unimaginable chaos ensues.
“The idea that nations and homelands seek happiness is an enormous illusion and self-deception. Happiness, besides being unattainable, is also unbearable. What will you do with its volatile matter, that feather-light phantom, a soap bubble that bursts in front of your nose, leaving a bit of stinging foam in your eyes?
Happiness, you say? Happiness is as perishable as milk left out in the sun, as a fly in winter and a crocus in early spring. Its backbone is as fragile as a seahorse’s."
This book is wicked and whip-smart. It’s laugh-out-loud funny in places and, all of a sudden, it’s terrifyingly real and desperately sad. It matters a whit that the setting is Bulgaria and Switzerland. It could truly have been set anywhere. The many delightful and thoughtful sentences in the book will need revisiting on and off, much like the past that we may revisit—only briefly, only briefly—in order to really live in our future.