When you choose to stop the clock: Georgi Gospodinov’s novel Time Shelter
The 2020 novel Time Shelter, by the award-winning Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov, explores memory and nostalgia through an unsettling premise. The story follows Gaustine, a mysterious “time therapist” who has set up a special clinic where different eras are recreated. The idea spreads across Europe, and entire nations hold referendums to decide which decade they want to live in.
Time Shelter recently came out in Ukrainian. We review this novel, full of dark humor and philosophical reflection, examining how individuals and societies mythologize time in order to survive it.
Every story occupies its place in time, flowing like the long scroll on the icon of the angel rolling up the sky. This image depicts the end of history, the apocalypse – when we come to a stop, and the scroll ends, and it’s game over. When the past happens instead of the future, the circle closes, and the cycle is complete.
Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter is a novel about the urge to freeze time. At a casual literature seminar, the narrator, who goes by the initials G.G., meets the psychiatrist Gaustine (a name you may know from Gospodinov’s The Physics of Sorrow). The men develop a friendly acquaintance and later a correspondence. Only, for some reason, Gaustine sends the narrator letters that appear to be written from different decades and adhere fully to the styles of their respective periods. G.G., for his part, is not entirely sure he hasn’t invented Gaustine, or that Gaustine is not, in fact, him. (The narrator’s initials suggest he is an alter-ego of the author, or at least that the author is playing at this association.) In time, the two of them (or one of them, perhaps, or none of them) open a clinic for Alzheimer’s patients. The novel’s slippery narrative of uncertainty rests on a number of literary allusions, beginning with the narrator’s citation of W.H. Auden’s apocalyptic poem September 1, 1939, published in the anthology Another Time. Another time is coming – a big war after which, rumor has it, poetry as such will become impossible.
The psychiatrist’s name, Gaustine, also has a mythical quality, being a chimera of Garibaldi (the revolutionary) and Augustine (the Saint). His parents were unable to decide who to name him after, leaving him to straddle two identities. Saint Augustine’s presence isn’t a coincidence: in his Confessions, the theologian emphasizes the unique importance of memory in making sense of time, as it links events together into a single temporal thread. 1500 years after Augustine, Henri Bergson built his concept of duration on these same ideas, while Proust, having read Bergson, produced European literature’s most prominent roman-fleuve on time and memory.
In recounting their memories, the book’s heroes alter them: the observer effect functions here as in physics. Speaking of observers, G.G., the unnamed narrator, calls himself Ishmael, and in doing so establishes the conventional framework of the narrative. It’s also important that the characters meet at a literary seminar, as this points the reader toward a playing field. The narrator is constantly looking for Gaustine, and invariably finds him when he needs him most. When G.G. asks him reproachfully where he’s been, Gaustine replies, “Weren’t you the one who invented me?” Ishmael is history’s scribe; the one fated to survive in order to tell of how people’s obsessions ruin others’ lives. As for Gaustine, he functions as a gate, a door to every era, his nature is split like Janus’s (in one scene, the narrator listens repeatedly to Alabama Song by The Doors, in which Jim Morrison sings, “I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die”). At the same time, he’s a modern character, a flâneur, though he strolls through time rather than city streets. He has no fixed location; no homeland, much like the Tralfamadorian nomads in Kurt Vonnegut’s book Slaughterhouse Five. To wander through time is to see death again and again. So it goes.
Gaustine sets up his clinic’s headquarters in Switzerland. He says history leaves no trace here, owing to the country’s neutral status, freeing the mind to ponder. Switzerland is where Einstein completed his theory of relativity, and where Thomas Mann wrote The Magic Mountain, a novel about time (what is called in German a “Zeitroman”) and about time getting stuck. James Joyce, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, and Robert Walser all moped about in Switzerland, and Hermann Hesse hid there from his pestering fans.
Gaustine and G.G. select exclusive era markers for each patient. For example, Mircea from Turnu Măgurele in Romania opts to relive an alternate, American, past, rather than her own. Patient N. doesn’t remember his life, but Agent A., who has been tracking him, has a whole store of data and offers up his own vision of the patient’s probable past. The oldest want to return to the days of World War II, and so a bomb shelter is set up for them – and so Gospodinov’s shelter metaphor becomes literal.
The past is just an illusion constructed by others; a stranger’s words awkwardly strung together. All told, it’s almost impossible to distinguish your own memories from imposed memories that you have integrated. In communist countries the future was mapped out and calculated for citizens, unchanging and unchangingly optimistic, while the past was constantly transforming depending on who was in power – something Gospodinov also pokes fun at.
The new clinics, and even entire blocks, built to bring back specific years from the past become both refuges and prisons for patients. One old man breaks his leg trying to climb over a barrier to get to the western side of an improvised bridge: he has gone back to a year when the Berlin Wall still stood. Rather than tear it down, staff place a guard on its eastern side. The narrator refers to another resident of the past as a “Lonely Long-Distance Runner”. The patient does, in fact, like to run, but the characterization is also an allusion to Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 story about a teenager in juvenile detention. Indeed, everyone who takes up residence in a given year ends up hostage to an endless loop of repeating events, many of them horrific – like Ms. Sh., who survived the Holocaust, and now dreads the shower.
The narrator’s father also ends his earthly journey in a block from the past, coming full circle and returning to his own beginning. Upon burying his father, G.G. reflects that the Odyssey is a story of the search for one’s father and a return to the past. One could interpret the Iliad along those same lines, as a story about being wrapped up in the past – a past marriage, past treaties – leading to devastation in the present. Of course, epics tend to be set in the distant past, since greatness doesn’t marry well with anything resembling the present, whose faults we can study under a microscope.
The clinic’s success births a trend for temporal tourism: one may now return on any given day to the first bloom of one’s youth, one’s first love, or the peak of one’s career. And it doesn’t end there. When all of Europe loses faith in the future, it turns back to the past. Gospodinov’s novel sees entire countries opting via referendum to return to specific eras. The deeply conservative tendencies in today’s historiography are hard to miss: Poland goes in for Sarmatism, Ukrainians tout the greatness of the Rus’ era, and modern British authors sing the praises of Victorianism. The past has a way of getting forgotten, making it easier to idealize. And so national mythology is the foundation of identity and rootedness, a natural extension of our existence in the moment. Yet nostalgia can become a weapon.
A grand piece of theater then unfolds in Bulgaria, where the narrator goes to observe the time referendum. Two rival parties hold reenactment rallies: on one side are the Bulgarian Knights, who are campaigning to live in the 18th century, and on the other, the Movement for 1960s-style socialism. The most sought-after professionals are now theater actors who play revolutionaries. It’s hard to shake the feeling that we’re reading a sequel to Julian Barnes’ dystopian novel England, England, only with a more frightening stage set.
G.G. finally sinks into autofiction. His meditations and observations evolve into a stream of consciousness that gets more and more incoherent. Forgetting destroys consciousness, as memory is the basis for identity. In the final chapter the narrator grows younger, and his narrative becomes progressively simpler. Words are erased and filed in A Brief Dictionary of the Forgotten. This is the story of a Benjamin Button cross-bred with the narrator of Flowers for Algernon. For Gospodinov, an author who started out as a poet, every word matters, and the loss of a single one is a tragedy. “Language is smarter than we are,” Gospodinov has said in an interview. The degradation of the narrator’s language, then, can be read as a sign of his personal apocalypse.
The structure of Gospodinov’s novel is fragmentary, and you could rearrange the pieces – which would transform the picture altogether. The first two parts focus on individual memory, the second two on collective memory, and the epilogue weaves it all together. If the novel starts off with the involuntary loss of memory, then the later parts deal with a conscious abstention from memory, a reality splattered with markers of another era. In On Collective Memory, the French philosopher Maurice Halbwachs describes how those in power often try to colonize time: they seize it like an aggressive conqueror seizes foreign territory – a process Gospodinov also depicts.
Everything modern in Time Shelter comes unglued, mixes with artifacts of the past, and is denied as such. In 1984, Orwell’s hero also transforms the past, by rewriting documents and airbrushing photos to rid them of the faces of political figures who have fallen from favor into persecution. The totalitarian machine calls not only for people’s physical destruction, but for their erasure from memory. Photographs seem like the most objective possible witnesses of all that has happened, as they capture and freeze time. Yet due to their awful reliability, theirs is the testimony that most lends itself to falsification. Efforts to change the past often lead to catastrophe. And attempts to reconstruct the routines of a past era can lead to oppression. When they arrive in their new pasts, the heroes of Time Shelter must conform entirely to avoid punishment. In the narrator’s home country, Bulgaria, the sale of period costumes becomes a cutting-edge business: the disguises help people fake affiliation with another century or decade, at a time when staying modern has become taboo.
Freezing time is often the sign of a great tragedy. Austerlitz, by the German novelist V. G. Sebald, contains an eloquent episode where the main character, Jacque, is shown the lake that swallowed the village of Llanwddyn when a dam was built. At the bottom of the reservoir, everything is as it was: a little dog sits on the knees of a little girl, the houses are all decked out, the streets are clean. Pompeii comes to mind. A prehistoric insect in a chunk of amber is perfectly preserved, and dead. The phrase “time shelter” invariably evokes a bomb shelter, a place that saves lives. But spending time in a bomb shelter means losing touch with the outside world.
In one scene in the novel Gaustine invites the narrator on an excursion. He says, “Let’s go down to ‘68” – meaning, to the decade before the one they’re in, located below where they are standing. It’s like the circles of Hell, the narrator thinks to himself. Only, before diving into another era, you have to forget your own. There were two rivers in Hades. If you drank from the River Lethe, you would forget everything from your earthly life. Yet there was another river too, belonging to Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. The initiated had to learn to tell the rivers apart, as memory was a good worth fighting for. On the other hand, without forgetting your past life, you could not be reborn in the next. Clinging desperately to memory means getting trapped in the moment. In other words, remember, but learn to let go.
The novel’s narrator calls amnesia a mercy, an anesthetic, a final chance to frolic in the fields of one’s childhood. Amnesia, though, makes history fruitless. Gaustine’s project testifies to God’s dementia, in the narrator’s words, – since God created time. Yet all our deeds, good and bad, will be added up on judgement day, meaning that you could also call God a perfect memory machine. If his memory fails, all deeds lose their meaning. The antique pantheon, apart from the front-row players everyone knows, features countless minor characters. One of these is Kairos, the god of the fleeting moment, the lucky coincidence. If you catch him by his single lock of hair, your life changes for the better. Kairos is Zeus’s son – only, not an important one, just one of his many extramarital offspring. Kairos had his own sacrificial altar by the entrance to the stadium at Olympia, as a single moment makes all the difference in competition. But outside of the Olympics, Kairos was not worshipped so avidly. The value of a moment is precisely in its passing, and not even the most wonderful moments are worth holding on to.
Translated from Ukrainian by Kathatine Quinn-Judge.
