Time Shelter

Powell's Midyear Roundup

The Best Books of 2022 (So Far)

There has been a failure of the future in Europe, and, increasingly, no one wants to live in the unstable present it keeps creating. Instead, people decide to make a time shelter for themselves, to recapture and recreate a past in which they felt most comfortable. But how to choose the best decade? As each country in the European Union holds a referendum to figure out which period of time was most idyllic for that nation, the story gets more brilliant and ridiculous and yet poignant, becoming a dissection of 20th-century nationalism, communism, and culture. The comparison of simultaneous pasts on each side of the Iron Curtain is particularly hilarious and fascinating. Truly, I didn't think they made novels like this, anymore, full of ideas and sardonic wit — a book in the lineage of Dostoevsky and Borges. Recommended By Jennifer K., Powells.com

An award-winning international sensation—with a second-act dystopian twist—Time Shelter is a tour de force set in a world clamoring for the past before it forgets.

“At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter’s enigmatic narrator, who will go unnamed. “In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century.
 
In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first “clinic for the past,” an institution 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 to unlock what is left of their fading memories. Serving as Gaustine’s assistant, the narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even wisps of afternoon light. But as the charade becomes more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic to escape from the dead-end of their daily lives—a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself.
 
“A trickster at heart, and often very funny” (Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker), prolific Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov masterfully stalks the tragedies of the last century, including our own, in what becomes a haunting and eerily prescient novel teeming with ideas. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel, Time Shelter is a truly unforgettable classic from “one of Europe’s most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists” (Dave Eggers).

"Georgi Gospodinov is unique in many ways. I've been reading him since the beginning and I know that no one can combine an intriguing concept, wonderful imagination, and perfect writing technique like he can." Olga Tokarczuk, Nobel Prize-winning author of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

"Gospodinov writes like a botanist of the soul: he knows the effects of the pretty mushrooms and the hidden herbs within ourselves in spite of what they look like from afar. The living beings he studies are our versions of our past, the unretrievable, the recreated, the future versions of our past, and how we imbue them with the fantasies and poisons that we cultivate in silence." Yuri Herrera, author of Signs Preceding the End of the World

"In equal measure playful and profound, Georgi Gospodinov's Time Shelter renders the philosophical mesmerizing, and the everyday extraordinary. I loved it." Claire Messud

"Gospodinov is one of Europe's most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists, and this his most expansive, soulful and mind-bending book." Dave Eggers

"In this book, time sneaks away and then returns, reconstituted. Franz Ferdinand is re-assassinated. The cigarettes you liked as a teenager are on sale again. Communism is back, and nice. The book is a satire, witty and scorching, but it is also wise and tender. Your grandmother is there." Joan Acocella, The New Yorker staff writer

"A powerful and brilliant novel: clear-sighted, foreboding, enigmatic... in which the future gives way like a rotten beam, and the past rushes in like a flood." Sandro Veronesi, author of The Hummingbird

Georgi Gospodinov, one of Bulgaria's most lauded authors, has won the Angelus Central European Literature Award and the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, among many other accolades.

Angela Rodel, recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant and NEA Literature Translation Fellowship, is a prolific translator of Bulgarian literature.