Time Shelter tells a strange story. It doesn’t go the way you expect it to, and it is neither particularly cohesive throughout its 300 pages nor does it bring a fresh sense of excitement.
The book is very much a product of the present time. It was first published in its native Bulgarian in 2020, and it could not have been a product of a different period in history. For some, the Europe of today is experiencing a small revival of the far right — the AfD in Germany, or the RN in France, or UKIP and Brexit, for instance. The left has not surged to nearly the same extent, though I’m certain the author, Gospodinov, would disagree.
We begin with what seems like an exploration of Alzheimer’s. The premise is simple. As the immediate post-war generation begins to age, we’ll have to contend with greater rates of Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other developments associated with the elderly. The underlying treatment, a “time shelter” with preserved environments from decades of the past, is a compelling one. The middle content and the stories of patrons that are aging is not — they are not particularly unique for vignettes of past lives and they remain thoroughly unremarkable. Books have played this same game before, this book offers nothing new on this front.
It would be natural to settle on this idea of Alzheimer’s and dementia — what, after all, are the implications of a growing society? How do we contend with a substantially darker past? The atrocities of World War II, or the Berlin Wall are still fairly recent. The number of people who lived through that history is steadily decreasing.
The author is not content with this, and continues on. The past begins to collide with the present. Is our nostalgia really what happened? Soon many more people wish to live through the past, often a past that they did not themselves live through. When you think about this idea in the context of the revival of radicalism, it becomes crystal clear what Gospodinov seeks to argue. Time Shelter is a product of Europe of the late 2010s, a hardly progressive take on what he feels threatens the sensibilities of the liberal intellectualism that has long dominated the region.
In the countries of the former Soviet Union, a YouTuber called “bald and bankrupt” explores what is often rarely explored and rarely discussed regions, at least to the anglophone world. With him, we leave the large metropoles of Moscow, or Tallinn, or Kyiv, and explore the provincial towns and villages of far-off regions in these countries. And the verdict is overwhelmingly clear: while we see relative prosperity in well-known cities, the rest of the region has been functionally left behind in the 1990s, after the collapse of the USSR. They reminisce of a more prosperous time under socialism. While urban intellectuals protest their country’s history, others are living in literal crumbling relics of the distant past. The last 30 years have not been kind to them, and so they (rather justifiably) continue to look back.
The prose lacks depth in what it is trying to argue. Gospodinov’s already lukewarm, room temperature, benign takes on modernity and on populism and on those who seek solutions to their countries’ problems in the past are given to the reader with no extra work required. There is no deeper layer to it (believe me, I’ve tried to look). His opinions are thinly masked behind what is a rather finely crafted story in its first act, and absolutely nothing in the following acts. This is a crude political satire: if the book could name names, it would.
What this means is that the book boils this look at the past down to a one-sided criticism. He suggests that those who look at the past should simply ought not to — he says because they haven’t lived through it, they wouldn’t know. But of course, people were in many tangible and concrete ways left behind by the collapse of socialism. It follows a trend of socially liberal politicians offering platitudes to the people, of telling them to “just don’t go down that route” without understanding the core reasons people do these things. Behind this year’s winner of the International Booker Prize, is a shockingly one-dimensional argument, devoid of any depth.
There were many positive points to the novel that I will give credit to. The writing before the novel devolved was quite fun to read, mainly as a result of its finer explorations of the Europe of the past. These parts of the novel were refreshing in some sense. There was so much potential on these two fronts that I feel almost disappointed in how overtly benign it was.
2.5/5
Written 2 September 2023 Adapted from my review on Goodreads.