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Time Shelter

Reviewed by Andrew Whitehead

Published : Saturday, 20 May, 2023 at 12:00 AM  Count : 728

Time Shelter

Time Shelter

In Georgi Gospodinov's International Booker-shortlisted Time Shelter, translated from Bulgarian, the past invades the present, lending an eerie reflection of contemporary times

Most partitions - India, Korea, Ireland, Germany, Cyprus, Israel/Palestine - have been accompanied by tragedy. That's also true of the wider partition that's rarely talked about in those terms, the wrenching apart of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War. Stalin's wily diplomacy, aided by the liberating troops of the Red Army, secured Soviet dominance over not only part of Germany, but Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria too. In Winston Churchill's memorable phrase, an 'iron curtain' descended across Europe. It remained in place for almost half-a-century.

Georgi Gospodinov is Bulgarian - the nation that was Moscow's most loyal communist ally - and now lives in the once-partitioned city that was at the crux of Europe's Cold War, Berlin. Time Shelter is an exploration of the lasting imprint of communist totalitarianism, how it is remembered and how memory, the 'bomb shelter of the past', can be both a comfort and a trap.
Difficult to forget

At the heart of this immersive narrative is an account of an elusive psychiatrist - the apparent alter ego of the central character - who sets up a clinic in Zurich for those with dementia and memory loss. On each floor, a different decade is recreated to the last detail: furnishings, music, food, even papers and magazines. Those who have lost their present take refuge in the trappings of their past.

Many of the patients are from Eastern Europe. Some hanker for the grime and austerity of their Soviet-imbued youth; others for the more liberated adolescence that was denied them. So floors are divided between Soviet-bloc and western representations of times past. And some inmates seek to clamber over the divide between East and West - an iron curtain recreated in a nursing home hallway.

One patient - an East European onetime dissident - is so desperate to retrieve the memories he has lost that he persuades the former secret service agent who once tailed him to meet. He is informed of a lover of whom he has no recollection; he's shown a snatched photograph of him and his mistress. He asks what happened to her when he was jailed. The answer is difficult to forget.

The clinic is a success, so much so that others sprout up with the same idea, and they attract clients who have no medical diagnosis but just like the idea of retreating into their favourite decade. The anomie with the present is so intense, entire nations decide to turn the clock back. But to which decade? Every European Union member state (Britain is excluded because of Brexit) stages a referendum to decide to which period they should return, so that 'all of us can live in the nation of our happiest time'.

Journey through Europe

So the past invades the present. The novel's central character returns to his native Bulgaria to observe the climax of a referendum campaign between the Socs, who favour a return to the familiar privations of Sixties state socialism, and the Heroes, who look back to an abortive nationalist uprising of the 1870s. Different countries opt for different eras, so Europe is divided not simply by nation and language but by decade too.

But then the key character's grip on the past - his own memory and identity - begins to falter. Is the story he has told remembered or imagined? And what's the difference?

Georgi Gospodinov writes lightly, delicately, humorously - in different registers, and with much play on words. The success of the English rendition of Time Shelter - deservedly short-listed for the International Booker Prize - is a tribute to its American-born translator, Angela Rodel. A novel this innovative and ingenious is not going to succeed on all counts. But it stimulates and entertains - a winding journey through Europe's maddeningly painful recent past.

Gospodinov, by the way, was born in 1968, the year of two failed European revolutions: the students' uprising in Paris, and Czechoslovakia's brief dalliance with liberal communism in the Prague Spring. He dedicates the novel to his parents 'who are still weeding the eternal strawberry fields of childhood'. And we all know that the berries we picked as a child are the sweetest.
Courtesy: THE HINDU






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