Mr. Gospodinov...is a nostalgia artist ... His books are preoccupied with memory, its ambiguous pleasures and its wistful, melancholy attraction. He is most drawn to minor and personalized details ... The book flows between the remembered and the purely imagined as easily as it wanders through time ... The novel rambles among elaborations of its fantastical conceit, flashbacks to the narrator’s youth, and meditations on the current condition of Europe with no apparent cohesive structure. Caveat lector: This makes for an extremely diffuse and piecemeal book. But the absence of a stabilizing center of gravity is symptomatic of a continent still recovering from the hammer-blows of World War II and the Cold War ... Mr. Gospodinov also grasps the dangers of escapism ... This difficult but rewarding novel concludes with an image of Europe brought to the brink of renewed conflict—an abstraction that recent events have imbued with the terrible force of reality.
The morality of artificially returning people to the past, and the broader question of whether this truly brings solace — whether indulgence in nostalgia is curative or pernicious — is the central question of Georgi Gospodinov’s newly translated novel ... He is sympathetic to the poignancy of things from before...but rebuffs the scapegoats of globalism, immigration and modernization that supposedly killed them off; we are all complicit in the destruction of history, and going backward can only mean intolerance and the exaltation of traditionalist kitsch ... Gospodinov is too delicate to resort to crude political satire. He is certain the flight into the past will not undo the conflicts of the present ... Old resentments fester until a misbegotten re-enactment of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination brings the continent to the brink of a 'second First World War' ... Gospodinov strays a bit after this, with a sequence of journal entries that exposes his narrator’s own cognitive decline. There’s a tacked-on feeling to the dreams and trivia at the end of this touching and intelligent book.
Georgi Gospodinov has terrific fun in Time Shelter creating the world’s first 'clinic for the past' ... The bald premise here isn’t as fanciful as it might sound ... This is not a realist novel. It is very much a genre-busting novel of ideas. This is a book about memory, how it fades and how it is restored, even reinvented, in the imaginations of addled individuals and the civic discourse of nations ... Gospodinov’s notes on national character and historical determinism threaten to swallow the book ... Gospodinov chillingly describes the process of mental ageing ... His story is strong enough — the tale of an innocent caught up in a harebrained scheme. But Gospodinov is one of those writers who thinks novels can, and perhaps should, contain more than just a story. Notes, for example. Political observations ... Can novels really hold so much? ... The risk with a project like this is that it slips fiction’s tracks and becomes nothing more than an overlong London Review of Books article ... In its garish light, Gospodinov’s fanciful and rambling meditation on midlife crisis, crumbling memory and historical re-enactment acquires a more pointed, political meaning ... Intimate and personal.
A 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.
... a seamless English translation ... The novel asks a lot of intriguing questions but doesn’t provide many answers, leaving readers to come to their own conclusions. For a novel so steeped in layers of nostalgia, this open-endedness works well because every reader brings different experiences of the past and so will have different opinions and reactions to interpretations of it. Gospodinov can also feel unfocused, however, as if he has too much on his mind or is too enamored of what he finds there to linger long enough to provide any answers. This tendency was most acute in the novel’s intentionally meandering metafictional conclusion, written as the mind of the author/narrator is fighting against forgetting. It is a conceit — the writer writing about writing the novel we are reading — that is so overdone at this point that authors who go there should say something new. Gospodinov doesn’t. Despite what didn’t work for me, the novel as a whole poses a fascinating hypothetical: What if we as a society become so afraid of what lies ahead that we condemn ourselves to reliving our familiar pasts, despite knowing the horrors they contain and the destinations where they lead? And what if we are already heading in that direction?
A different kind of time-travel novel, one based on memories ... he elegant translation and the short, lyrical chapters in this dystopian tale offer a poignant ode to the dual tragedies of personal and universal memory loss.
Electric and fantastical ... The clever prose sells the zany premise and imbues it with poignant longing ... Thought-provoking and laced with potent satire, this deserves a spot next to Kafka.
Though the story at times meanders, translator Rodel keeps the narrator’s wry voice consistent. And in its brisker latter chapters, the story achieves a pleasurably Borges-ian strangeness while sending a warning signal about how memory can be glitch-y and dangerous ... An ambitious, quirky, time-folding yarn.