Quotes and Micro review: 'Time Shelter' by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rode

[Mohan Gulrajani]

Micro review: 'Time Shelter' by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel

TIMESOFINDIA.COM

Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov is considered as one of the most important writers of contemporary European literature. He won the International Booker Prize 2023 for his book 'Time Shelter', which is translated into English by Angela Rodel. 'Time Shelter' tells the story of Gaustine, who starts a clinic for Alzheimer patients and those suffering with dementia to help them recover their memory. In his clinic, each floor is a replica of each decade of the 20th century which transports the patients back in time. It's the responsibility of Gaustine's assistant, who is unnamed in the story, to collection items from the past decades for the clinic. Soon Gaustine's idea and his clinic becomes popular-- not just with the patients but also among people, who wish to escape from present-day reality and live in the past. This results into an unexpected problem where the past begins to affect the present.

Narrated through Gaustine's unnamed assistant's point of view, 'Time Shelter' asks many important questions; however, it lets readers to find the answers on their own. Georgi Gospodinov is the first-ever Bulgarian writer to win the prestigious International Booker Prize. This makes his award-winning novel 'Time Shelter' an important book to read this year.
How critics view the book:
Leila Slimani, French novelist and Chair of Judges for International Booker Prize 2023, said, "It's a very profound work that deals with a contemporary question and also a philosophical question: What happens to us when our memories disappear? But it is also a great novel about Europe, a continent in need of a future, where the past is reinvented and where nostalgia can be a poison."

Patrick McGuinness writes for The Guardian, "From communism to the Brexit referendum and conflict in Europe, this funny yet frightening Bulgarian novel explores the weaponisation of nostalgia".

Kirkus Reviews calls it "An ambitious, quirky, time-folding yarn."

Time Shelter  by Georgi Gospodinov :  Quotes

Top of Form

1.     “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.”

2.     “There is no time machine except the human being.”

3.     “In the end, writing arises when man realizes that memory is not enough.”

4.     “I'm getting old. Exiled ever further from the Rome of childhood in the distant empty provinces of old age, from which there is no return. And Rome no longer answers my letters. Somewhere the past exists as a house or a street that you've left for a short while, for five minutes, and you've found yourself in a strange city. It's been written that the past is a foreign country. Nonsense. The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country, full of strange faces, I won't set foot there. Let me go back home... my mother told me not to be late.”

5.     “We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn’t put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains.”

6.     “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.”

7.     “It's well known that our inept home grown police of all eras have always shown unerring taste in poets and writers - they always manage to kill the most talented and leave the most mediocre.”

8.     “The past grows like a weed.”

9.     “Everything always comes down to language in the end.”

10. “Time feeds on us. We are food for time.”

11. “The past settles into afternoons, that’s where time visibly slows down, it dozes off in the corners, blinking like a cat looking through thin blinds. It’s always afternoon when you remember something, at least that’s how it is for me. Everything is in the light.”

12. “You can't make a museum to preserve something that has never left.”

13. “Now the last person who remembered me as a child is gone, I told myself. And only then did I burst into sobs, like a child.”

14. “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?”

15. “When I write, I know who I am, but once I stop, I am no longer so sure.”

16. “They often keep turning the handle of the grinder after the coffee is ground.”

17. “Happy countries are all alike; each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way, as has been written.”

18. “Soon after that we would go our separate ways, grow cold, forget one another, the rebels would grow tame as teaching assistants in the universities, the sworn bachelors and party animals would be pushing baby carriages and zoning out in front of their TV, the hippies would get regular haircuts at the local barbershop.”

19. “Your grandmother had an icon, your mother had a little portrait of Lenin, and you have your TV.”

20. “Outside Bulgaria's borders people age more beautifully and more slowly, old age is more merciful elsewhere.”

21. “If no one remembers becomes the equivalent of If there is no God. If there is no God, Dostoyevsky said, then everything is permitted.”

 

 

Professor (Dr.) M. L. Gulrajani F.S.D.C. (UK)

Former Professor and Dean (I.R&D), IIT Delhi

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