PositiveAstra MagA chronicle of time itself: this is the ambitious task undertaken by Georgi Gospodinov ... Folding time onto itself and slipping between moods, narrators, decades, countries, and even languages, it also directs an unblinking gaze towards the numerous moral failings of communism, war, and poverty ... Gospodinov is a perpetual collector of stories, and these are the brushstrokes that compose his abstract canvases. He blends the meta with the auto and the non in his fiction, and while his books are filled with memorable supporting characters, they often remain unnamed, their stories peripheral ... This creates a deconstructed, highly conceptual style full of intertwining vignettes, ruminations, and fragments all shooting back and forth in time, dialoguing with each other across novels ... This novel, his third, is more unequivocally political. In trademark style, Gospodinov still crafts the work as a literary mosaic, but in this instance it is underlaid with something far more traditional: a plot ... The novel, at its core, offers a sober reminder of what authoritarianism in Bulgaria actually felt like. The real stuff is just as shocking and sad as the invented ... Gospodinov has a habit of veiling pain behind wistful humor, a defense mechanism no doubt born out of the system’s crushing eradication of revolt. He uses the absurdities of the very specific universe of Bulgarian pain, of Bulgarian provincial poverty, to unveil deep wounds ... Time Shelter collapses the crises of the past and present without offering a future, as Bulgaria weighs whether to return to its pre-liberation past or socialism ... The novel lurches forward as across Europe, each country begins its own referendum on the past. It’s an extended, ambitious, and often lush meandering but it weighs the material down, so overtly political and concerned with historical detail that it detracts from the author’s otherwise light touch on the page ... Angela Rodel...carries over Gospodinov’s grand, flowing Bulgarian sentences, with their maddening rivets and sometimes antiquated turns, into vivid English ... Time Shelter is rightly concerned with the perilous state of the world, with Bulgaria’s condition, specifically, and with that of any European country threatened by the titanic appetites of its neighbors. The urgent and unsubtle horror here is that the present is grayed out, that there’s more past than future.
Garth Greenwell
RaveThe Chicago ReaderWhat Belongs to You is radical and brave not only because it explores gay lives with openness and nuance, but because it does so by avoiding the trappings of a narrative built around gay people aiming for the heterosexual model of life.
