Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars


The Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize, which is given for a translated work, in 2023. It’s about two men who open a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by recreating a happy period in their past. Soon, relatives and others are asking for a similar service. Eventually, the wish to live within the best time of your life spreads across nations throughout Europe, with tragic consequences.

On one level, the novel is a dark satire about the populist, nationalist movements that have taken a foothold around the world. In an interview associated with the Booker Prize, Gospodinov said, “My urge to write this book came from the sense that something had gone awry in the clockworks of time…. The world’s disintegration with the encroachment of populism and playing the card of the ‘great past’ in the US and in Europe provoked me…. I come from a system that sold a ‘bright future’ under communism. Now the stakes have shifted, and populists are selling a ‘bright past’. I know via my own skin that both cheques bounce, they are backed by nothing…. How does one live with a deficit of meaning and future?”

What’s remarkable about this novel is that interwoven between these larger events is an intimate meditation about aging, memory, and nostalgia as the unnamed narrator wrestles with his growing inability to discern fact from fiction and past from present. Eventually, it becomes a novel about the loss of memory, the disintegration of the past.

This is a wonderfully philosophical novel. It’s best read slowly, with ample time for thought and digestion. Its one shortfall is that its characters aren’t the most developed, but this is a novel of ideas, and Gospodinov has no shortage of those.