Name: Time Shelter
Rating: 3.46875 (16 reviews)
ISBN: 9781324090953

Georgi Gospodinov

For fans of Yoko Ogawa and Dave Eggers, a mesmerizing, dystopian novel of time and memory from Bulgaria's most significant living writer.

Time Shelter

Jemima Scott

If we are not in someone else's memory, do we even exist at all? 

clara

Jawahir M

The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined.

The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells, and ills the freed-up niches with ersatz-memory.

Forgetting takes a lot of work. You have to constantly remember that you are supposed to forget somnething. Surely that's how every ideology functions 

Isabel 

How do you leave this life, goddamn it, where have they hidden the door?

Taira Robles

In any case, the basic question for both was how the past is made.

Will someone arrive like He the Messiah? Someone who will take mercy on the past's stiff dis-member-ed parts, its pale face and its stopped heart, and say, "Lazarus, come forth!" and it will gradually get its breath back, blood will start to flow beneath the waxy skin, its members will start to move, its plugged ears will clear up, and its eyes will open.

Or, while were waiting, various false prophets, tempters, and mad scientists will perform experiments upon its corpse and every time will end up with Frankenstein's monster. Can the past be resurrected or re-member-ed again? Should it be?

Actually, our bodies turn out to be quite merciful by nature, a little amnesia rather than anesthesia at the end. Our memory, which is leaving us, lets us play a bit longer, one last time in the Elysian fields of childhood. A few well-begged-for, please-just-five-more minutes, like in the old days, playing outside in the street. Before we get called home for good.

Forgetting takes a lot of work. You have to constantly remember that you are supposed to forget something. Surely that's how every ideology functions.

Swords are not forged from happiness, its stuff is fragile, its stuff is brittle. It does not lend itself to grand novels or songs or epics.

Novels and stories offer deceptive consolation about order and form.

So many places where I’m not. I’m not in Naples, in Tangier, Coimbra, Lisbon, New York, Yambol, and Istanbul. Not only am I not there, I am painfully absent. I am not there on a rainy afternoon in London, I am not there in the clamor of Madrid in the evening, I am not in Brooklyn in autumn, I am not there on the empty Sunday streets of Soia or Turin, in the silence of a Bulgarian town in 1978... 

I am so very absent. The world is overcrowded with my absence. Life is where I am not. No matter where I am..

A person is not built to live in the prison of one body and one time. 

Cassandra Tang

For us the past is the past, and even when we step into it, we know that the exit to the present is open, we can come back with ease. For those who have lost their memories, this door has slammed shut once and for all. 

He has no friends, no living relatives. No one to call. If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all? 

In this case, he had leapt over not only a fences but thirty or forty years as well. 

With age the fear of flying grows. Clearly it accumulates with the hours and miles you fly too, too bad you can’t cash it in, too. A Frequent Frighter card would be a nice idea.

But flies don’t have names, and therein lies the whole problem. If you don’t have a name, you’re dropped from history.

Its mornings are Austro-Hungarian, its nights are Italian. The tactic and grief are Bulgarian.

When you have no future, you vote for the past.

When people with whom you've shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing, since there's no such thing as half a past. It's as if you've torn a page in half lengthwise and you're reading the lines only to the middle, and the other person is reading the ends. And nobody understands anything. The person holding the other half is gone. The person who was so close during those days, mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights, in the months and years...There is no one to confirm it, there is no one to play through it with. 

I no longer remember who said that a nation was a group of people who have agreed to jointly remember and forget the same things.

In Time Shelter, an unnamed narrator meets Gaustine, a 'flâneur through time,' who has uncoupled his life from his contemporary reality, reading old news, wearing old clothes, haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century. Gaustine is the mind behind the first 'clinic for the past,' an institution based in Zurich that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time and find comfort in their fading memories. Yet an increasing number of healthy people are interested in seeking out the clinic as a form of 'time shelter,' hoping to escape from the horrors of our present, a development that results in an unexpected conundrum, when the past beings to invade the present.

I liked the idea of it, but i don’t why it took me forever to finish reading it.. a bit confusing writing (for me) maybe, don’t know..

Denis Crepaldi

Clinic of the past started off intriguing but was let down and lost by the second half of the book. 

Chris Dailey

Odd and poetic meditation on the power of the past. Set in a clinic for Alzheimer's patients that replicates different eras in an effort to help them relax and/or remember, we're taken on a topsy turvy journey through time and place. Memory, nostalgia, love, longing, nationalism and creativity are weaved throughout the non-linear format. The strongest pieces are the devastating passages and tender moments of people desperately trying to connect to each other.

Gelaine Trinidad

heart wrenchingly good… v v well written. beautiful and emotionally charged but also witty and v interesting commentary on European politics (that I cannot fully appreciate). the first half of the book focused on exploring time and memory, which I rly enjoyed! the second half moved into the more political side of things so less enjoyable (to me personally…) overall still an incredible book, and I loved the way this book ended as well!

Shalini Basu

Loved it when the protagonist talked about memory and the past in the individual level. This book definitely made me realise that I don’t know much of Eastern European history and gotta rectify that. I guess, I didn’t connect to the referendum by individual countries for the same reason, I couldn’t get the context.

Малко е странно да чета българска книга на английски, но така и не успях да се сдобия с копие в България, пък и наградата "Букър" е за преводна литература - няма как да я вземеш и без добър превод. Така че любопитството тук надделя и си я взех от местната библиотека.

Не бях сигурна какво да очаквам, но ми хареса. Самата концепция е от типа неща, които ми допадат - нещо, което хем върви към метафора, хем би било съвсем възможно да се случи в действителност при днешното състояние на света.  И лека полека нещата се разпадат - както се и случва с ума на човека с напредването на годините.

Книгата разглежда и трагедията на съвременните политически течения, и личните трагедии на хората, чиито ум е спечелил битката срещу самите тях. От гледна точка на политиката, книгата не е особено деликатна, а и като че ли и не цели да бъде. Когато се фокусира върху тези теми, романът наистина се превръща в огледало на съвременния свят.

Това не е особено нестандартно за модерната световна литература (аз съм от тези, които не вярват, че може да се пише литература, която е лишена от политика). Това, което обаче различава "Времеубежище" от неговите съвременници, е аспектът от съвременната политика, върху който се фокусира, както и как това е съпоставено с мини-света на личността. Истината е, че всички сме обсебени от миналото; като че тогава нещата винаги са били по-добре. Бабите си спомнят хубавите неща от соца (особено тези, които тогава са чувствали някакво ниво на сигурност, а сега трябва да избират между това дали да си купят лекарства или да си платят парното), англичаните си говорят за империята, и т.н. Някои тъгуват даже за времена, които нито те са виждали, нито дядовците им са виждали. Като че го правим от някакъв инстинкт за самосъхранение. 

И в романа е така - и те кара да се чудиш дали обществото не е само болно от някаква дименция.

Това като че ли е нещото, което ще остане в мен от книгата, макар че текстът също разглежда и темите за личността и личността в обществото. Но ето тази мъка по миналото и отказа да живеем в настоящето ми е много наболяла като тема.

Иначе от страна на превода, той ми се видя малко странен. На места изрази бяха запазени, а не локализирани. На места това като че е направено, за да се запази или стила на автора, или за да се подчертае нещо, което е типично българско. Но ми се стори, че имаше и доста места, на които на екипа може да им се е сторило, че пак това правят, а всъщност изказът излиза някак неестествен. Това го казвам като човек, който борави с двата езика ежедневно, редовно трябва да се примирява с факта, че някои фрази няма да се преведат достатъчно адекватно, и който има повече проблеми с превода на английски фрази на български, защото ги е учил без превод.

Но пък ми стана интересно да прочета книгата и на български - току виж и това станало по празниците.

A traslation of the above for my non-Bulgarian-speaker friends.

It is a little strange to read a Bulgarian book in English but I never got around getting a copy while in Bulgaria and the International Booker Prize is given for translated literature - you cannot receive it without a good translation. So my curiosity won and I got it from my local library.

I was not quite sure what to expect but I enjoyed it. The concept itself is the kind of thing that appeals to me - the story is both metaphorical and plausible in the current state of the work. And little by little, things start falling apart - much like our minds as we grow older.

The book examines both the tragedy of the current political movements and the personal tragedies of people whose minds have won out against them. Regarding politics, the book is not incredibly subtle but it does not appear to aim to be. When the novel focuses on this theme, it really becomes a mirror of the modern world.

This is not particularly uncommon for contemporary world literature (I am one of those people who believe that you cannot write apolitical literature). What to me really helps set "Time Shelter" apart from its contemporaries is the asepect of modern politics it choses to focus on, as well as the juxtaposition with the micro-world of the individual. The fact of the matter is that we are all obsesssed with the past - it always seems to us that everything was better back then. Eastern European grannies remember the better bits of the Communist years (especially those who back then could feel some sense of security and nowadays have to chose between having the medicine they need and paying their gas), the English talk about the Empire, etc. Some even miss time periods neither they themselves have experienced nor their grandparents have. It is like some kind of twisted sense of self-preservation.

This is what is shown in the novel - and it makes one wonder whether it is society itself that does not have dimentia.

This is perhaps what will stay with me from the book, even though the novel also examines the themes of personhood (in the face of regressing memory) and the individual in society. But it is that near-mourning of the past and the refusal to live in the present that seem urgent to me.

Otherwise, regarding the translation itself, I found it a little awkward. Certain turns of phrase have been kept from the original Bulgarian instead of being localised. In some places it appears like this is on purpose, to either keep the style of the author or to emphasise something that it is authentically Bulgarian. But it seemed to me that this was still the publishing team's intetion but the phrases themselves still came out awkward. And I say this as someone who uses both languages daily and who often has to make peace with the fact that some phrases will never have a precise translation and who nowadays has more trouble translating figures of speech from English to Bulgarian because of the way I have learned or use them.

But either way, this made me curious to read the book in Bulgarian, too - I might get around to it during the holidays, after all.

Малко е странно да чета българска книга на английски, но така и не успях да се сдобия с копие в България, пък и наградата "Букър" е за преводна литература - няма как да я вземеш и без добър превод. Така че любопитството тук надделя и си я взех от местната библиотека.

Не бях сигурна какво да очаквам, но ми хареса. Самата концепция е от типа неща, които ми допадат - нещо, което хем върви към метафора, хем би било съвсем възможно да се случи в действителност при днешното състояние на света.  И лека полека нещата се разпадат - както се и случва с ума на човека с напредването на годините.

Книгата разглежда и трагедията на съвременните политически течения, и личните трагедии на хората, чиито ум е спечелил битката срещу самите тях. От гледна точка на политиката, книгата не е особено деликатна, а и като че ли и не цели да бъде. Когато се фокусира върху тези теми, романът наистина се превръща в огледало на съвременния свят.

Това не е особено нестандартно за модерната световна литература (аз съм от тези, които не вярват, че може да се пише литература, която е лишена от политика). Това, което обаче различава "Времеубежище" от неговите съвременници, е аспектът от съвременната политика, върху който се фокусира, както и как това е съпоставено с мини-света на личността. Истината е, че всички сме обсебени от миналото; като че тогава нещата винаги са били по-добре. Бабите си спомнят хубавите неща от соца (особено тези, които тогава са чувствали някакво ниво на сигурност, а сега трябва да избират между това дали да си купят лекарства или да си платят парното), англичаните си говорят за империята, и т.н. Някои тъгуват даже за времена, които нито те са виждали, нито дядовците им са виждали. Като че го правим от някакъв инстинкт за самосъхранение. 

И в романа е така - и те кара да се чудиш дали обществото не е само болно от някаква дименция.

Това като че ли е нещото, което ще остане в мен от книгата, макар че текстът също разглежда и темите за личността и личността в обществото. Но ето тази мъка по миналото и отказа да живеем в настоящето ми е много наболяла като тема.

Иначе от страна на превода, той ми се видя малко странен. На места изрази бяха запазени, а не локализирани. На места това като че е направено, за да се запази или стила на автора, или за да се подчертае нещо, което е типично българско. Но ми се стори, че имаше и доста места, на които на екипа може да им се е сторило, че пак това правят, а всъщност изказът излиза някак неестествен. Това го казвам като човек, който борави с двата езика ежедневно, редовно трябва да се примирява с факта, че някои фрази няма да се преведат достатъчно адекватно, и който има повече проблеми с превода на английски фрази на български, защото ги е учил без превод.

Но пък ми стана интересно да прочета книгата и на български - току виж и това станало по празниците.

----

A traslation of the above for my non-Bulgarian-speaker friends.

It is a little strange to read a Bulgarian book in English but I never got around getting a copy while in Bulgaria and the International Booker Prize is given for translated literature - you cannot receive it without a good translation. So my curiosity won and I got it from my local library.

I was not quite sure what to expect but I enjoyed it. The concept itself is the kind of thing that appeals to me - the story is both metaphorical and plausible in the current state of the work. And little by little, things start falling apart - much like our minds as we grow older.

The book examines both the tragedy of the current political movements and the personal tragedies of people whose minds have won out against them. Regarding politics, the book is not incredibly subtle but it does not appear to aim to be. When the novel focuses on this theme, it really becomes a mirror of the modern world.

This is not particularly uncommon for contemporary world literature (I am one of those people who believe that you cannot write apolitical literature). What to me really helps set "Time Shelter" apart from its contemporaries is the asepect of modern politics it choses to focus on, as well as the juxtaposition with the micro-world of the individual. The fact of the matter is that we are all obsesssed with the past - it always seems to us that everything was better back then. Eastern European grannies remember the better bits of the Communist years (especially those who back then could feel some sense of security and nowadays have to chose between having the medicine they need and paying their gas), the English talk about the Empire, etc. Some even miss time periods neither they themselves have experienced nor their grandparents have. It is like some kind of twisted sense of self-preservation.

This is what is shown in the novel - and it makes one wonder whether it is society itself that does not have dimentia.

This is perhaps what will stay with me from the book, even though the novel also examines the themes of personhood (in the face of regressing memory) and the individual in society. But it is that near-mourning of the past and the refusal to live in the present that seem urgent to me.

Otherwise, regarding the translation itself, I found it a little awkward. Certain turns of phrase have been kept from the original Bulgarian instead of being localised. In some places it appears like this is on purpose, to either keep the style of the author or to emphasise something that it is authentically Bulgarian. But it seemed to me that this was still the publishing team's intetion but the phrases themselves still came out awkward. And I say this as someone who uses both languages daily and who often has to make peace with the fact that some phrases will never have a precise translation and who nowadays has more trouble translating figures of speech from English to Bulgarian because of the way I have learned or use them.

But either way, this made me curious to read the book in Bulgarian, too - I might get around to it during the holidays, after all.

Dystopian but completely realistic - the concept of the "Time Shelters" alone is fantastic. I was completely hooked when reading through which decade each EU country returned to (especially Austria!). Almost 5 stars, but it got a little too philosophical for me at times. Very well deserving of the Booker Prize, have already recommended to at least 5 people - hoping to be able to discuss it with a friend soon.

Time Shelter

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