Jason's Reviews > Time Shelter

“Somewhere in the Andes, they believe to this very day that the future is behind you. It comes up from behind your back, surprising and unforeseeable, while the past is always before your eyes, that which has already happened. When they talk about the past, the people of the Aymara tribe point in front of them. You walk forward facing the past and you turn back toward the future.”

As much as I enjoyed Time Shelter the 2023 Booker International Prize-winning novel by Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov, I'm not sure I feel comfortable recommending it to any friends or Goodreads connections reading this. The book is essentially plotless with almost no forward momentum and none of the catharsis that comes from building and resolving a central conflict. Instead, Time Shelter is an extended mediation on the topics of memory and history explored through a fictional premise. To wit, two men, one who seems to be the literary creation of the other, set up a memory clinic for patients with dementia or Alzheimers to live within a chosen decade in the past: the 50, 60s, 70s, etc. The idea then catches on to the point where people begin choosing en masse to forgo the present and live in happier decades of the past (I mean, I'll take 1994 with angsty Seattle grunge music, edgy independent cinema, and NHL 94 on a Super Nintendo). Eventually, all of Europe begins resetting to eras of past glory. Gospodinov is clearly satirizing the reemergence of nationalism and communism on the continent--do people not have grandparents to tell them how horrible these systems were?--and in this respect, the book is absolutely brilliant.

Brilliant as it is, it's not always easy to follow. Again, there's not much of a plot, and the narrator is prone to long digressions into history, literature, pop culture, and even personal autobiography. More than anything, Gospodinov's writing reminds me of Pynchon or even Joseph Heller, but there's plenty of Borges and Thomas Mann, whose The Magic Mountain is continually referenced and sometimes feels as though it has been remade here, as well. Time Shelter is one of the smartest and most ambitious works I've read in some time, but it's also a dense, literary book that requires a lot of work and focus. I'm glad to have read it and look forward to checking out the author's previous work, but, again, I'm not sure this is one I'd comfortably recommend to most people. Unless, I guess, this review is selling the book for you.