Looking to the past for a refuge from the future

Time Shelter, by Geordi Gospodinov, 2020

Pile of books

Time Shelter, by Geordi Gospodinov, translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2022. (Original publication date 2020)

Why write about it

Because its main premise is intriguing: that countries begin to take national votes on what older era to start pretending to live in, modelled after dementia homes that recreate the settings of earlier decades for the comfort of their residents.

It also comes the closest to being Borges-like of anything that I have ever read, and though it doesn’t quite get there — will go into why not below, in case of interest — that still makes it a great pleasure to read.

How I came across it

I was so happy to see this book in hard copy in the tiny English-language section of a small bookstore in a small town near the little village where I live.

I had been reading reviews of it for months at that point, and had downloaded the first chapter onto an e-reader without, however, actually reading it. There are books that one wants to read on e-readers, and books that one wants to read in hard copy, and this fell into the second category.

Text seems to lose about 10% of its virtues, on average, when I read it on a screen instead of in hard copy. For many books, this doesn’t matter — I read them for simple pleasure, and the 10% difference doesn’t affect that one way or another.

(I love the story Adam Gopnik tells in some essay of cooking for Alice Waters in his apartment in Paris, and realising that the food is not his best, and then realising that Alice Waters isn’t going to care about the difference between his best and his second best, just as Martina Navratilova wouldn’t care if his backhand was a little off on a day when he happened to play tennis with her. The differences just aren’t big enough to matter.)

The books I read on the screen are lovely, and make my life better, but 10% better or worse doesn’t matter. And now that there is almost no circulation of used books, it feels almost wrong to buy a one-time relaxing but inconsequential read in hard copy: all of that paper, all those dead trees, and human working hours, and energy, and then the transportation costs, going into something that will be read for a few hours and then either clutter up the house or go into the trash (which doesn’t happen because it is a physical pain to throw away any book except one which one thinks causes harm, and so one ends up with the clutter). Did you know that there are recycling centers now with bins reserved exclusively for books? And they fill, because books can no longer be sold or passed along as they were for all of my lifetime up to now.

For other books, the 10% difference is crucial: one is truly missing out if one loses so much of a good thing.

But am I the only one who finds her- or himself resisting buying books online now, as I find myself resisting buying new (unused) clothes? Not a thought-through thing full of logic or clear-cut morals, just a slight sense of unease, a feeling that there should be a better way of doing things, that this should be the exception rather than the rule. When I order books online now it is relatively rare, and I try to bundle things up. So I had been longing to read this book for months, but hadn’t.

The little bookstore is wonderful, but I don’t think that I really realised that until that day, a few months ago. That’s partly because many of the displays cater to the summer visitors and tourists who pass through that town, and so focus on vacation-style reads. The fact that the main literature section (in Swedish, of course) is serious and extensive had somehow, because of that, passed me by. And at the same time, the English-language section is tiny, and mostly has a few classics and then vacation-type reads, with a handful — perhaps 4 or 5 — recent serious pieces of literature on display on the wall beside the bookshelf.

When I took Time Shelter to the counter, the owner (I think) of the store was as pleased to see it in my hands as I had been to see it on the shelf. She hadn’t read it herself yet; she had ordered it because it sounded interesting, and because it had just won the International Booker, which made it more reasonable to take a risk on. My guess is that when the book comes out in Swedish and gets reviewed here it will be a natural fit for the store, but the English-language version is a different story. I said, enthusiastically — I was so glad to have come across it in hard copy — “It was lucky for me that you did.”

“It was lucky for me too,” she said.

About the book

I liked Time Shelter very much, though not as much as I expected to. That may be a function of reading it in translation: not that Angela Rodel’s translation feels less than excellent in any way, but because one suspects that there is a richness to the original that is somehow thinned out in English, a kind of energy that gets flattened a little, whether because of the language shift or because the reader in translation lacks a cultural warp that goes with the book’s weft. I have a feeling that even though I avoided the 10% loss that comes with readings texts electronically (for me), I still lost about that same amount by not reading it in the language it was written in.

About the book itself, finally: it’s rather brilliant. Literate, and full of explicit and inexplicit references to Western literature and, I think, to Slavic-language literature that I am too unread to catch. It is a minor pleasure simply to clock how much one doesn’t know of some entire areas of literature, without ever having thought about it so much one way or another.

The driving inspiration is Borges. And the subject is memory, both personal and national, and the consequences of lost memory and of a longing to return to the past.

As I was reading, I was reminded of a talk that the historian Timothy Snyder gave at Lund University a few years ago. In the talk, Snyder warned of two dangers when it comes to our roles as individuals, and collectively, in shaping the collective future: one is the trap of assuming that the past was better [a yearning to recreate some mythical golden past is of course a usual go-to of would-be fascist leaders], and the other is the trap of assuming that the future will take care of itself, that progress towards the better is natural and inevitable.

Gospodinov’s book is a witty, intelligent and, underneath the wit, deeply human look at the first trap. The idea of a national referendum being held in each European county to decide which decade from the past that country wants to begin living in again allows him to be both funny and pain-filled simultaneously. (For funny: his account of what Switzerland decides is laugh-out-loud hilarious. For pain-filled: the lines about what happens when young people in a previously authoritarian country begin to realise the reality of the past that they have chosen to go back to are heartbreaking.)

The passage that stuck with me the most from the book is this one:

The task was as follows. How can we get in a little more time for tomorrow, when we face a critical deficit of future? The simple answer was: By going backward a bit. If anything is certain, it's the past. Fifty years ago is more certain than fifty years from now. If you go two, three, even five decades back, you come out exactly that much ahead. Yes, it might already have been lived out, it might be a "secondhand "future, but it's still a future. It's still better than the nothingness yawning before us now. Since the Europe of the future is no longer possible, let's choose a Europe of the past. It's simple. When you have no future, you vote for the past.

Could [a specialist in Alzheimer’s clinics, who might or might not be a figment of the narrator’s imagination] help?

He could create a clinic, a street, a neighborhood, even a small city set in a specific decade. But to turn a whole country or an entire continent back to another time – this is where medicine becomes politics. And the moment for that had clearly arrived.

(p.124)

For much of the novel it reads as having a universal, or at the very least a pan-European, focus. Only towards the end does one realise that it is also, and maybe above all, specifically Bulgarian, and it is all the stronger for that.

It is also Borgesian? Yes, in the inventiveness and the wit and the literary qualities, and the sense of being ever so slightly on the edge of normality. But I think that for me the real difference is that it doesn’t make me think in quite the same way. There is a difference in kind between contemplating what it would mean to choose a past decade to live in and what it would mean to see everything and systematise or generalise or interpret nothing, or to become a person who could compose Don Quixote word for word in the 20th century, with all of the meanings and understandings that the text would carry if written in the modern era. If those two Borges contemplations change one forever when one has read them, as I think that they do, then this novel is not quite the same. But whether or not a novel is entirely Borgesian seems an insane standard by which to judge it, and not particularly relevant.