Review:  Time Shelter

My readings on Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia range from fiction to non-fiction and have revealed to me the vast literature that a strange disease can wrought on the imagination of writers and readers alike. A Bulgarian author Georgi Gospodinov really bends memory, time, genres, histories, nations, empires to create a surreal world where the past doesn’t flow into the present but is the present and the future and the present and the future disappears into the past. And so there are these time shelters much like bomb shelters where only the past lives. And that past is also a chosen past.

Imagine if you could choose a decade to live in. Since your birth, depending on your age, you could choose to live in the 40s, 50s or 60s. Even the 70s, 80s and 90s are up for grabs. Recreate a room, a floor, a house or even a city and then a nation along these timelines. A fantastical idea that explodes at its seams as the International Booker Prize winner of 2023 unravels.

In Time Shelter, the protagonist is a flaneur narrating the idea of a geriatric psychiatrist named Gaustine who ran a clinic in Zurich for Alzheimer’s and Dementia patients where they were allowed to live in their pasts. The pasts were meticulously recreated by Gaustine’s idea and the flaneur, who is GG (Georgi Gospodinov), travels around to recreate the past of the patients by gathering all the ephemera – furniture, curio, magazines, costumes, wall paper, utensils, together with the food like a loaf of factory-made bread of Bulgaria that a woman hankered after, to give the patients a safe place to be in. The clinic expands as inmates start filling up. And it fills up not just with patients but their families as well. Daughters wanting to live with mothers and spending time with them till time ran out and mothers went completely to seed as they lost every vestige of memory to the disease. There are various episodes in the clinic including that of a man who lives in the 80s running out of the clinic to warn the New York police of the impending murder of John Lennon.

GG in his attempt to authentically recreate the past visits Aarhus, in Denmark which has an ethnographic village made of old houses to show schoolchildren and tourists how their forefathers lived, how they raised cattle. Dementia villages are very much a part of caregiving in advanced countries like The Netherlands, Australia, the US where specialized, secure residential care models are designed to look and feel like a normal town. 

Interesting as it goes, Time Shelter at this stage opens up the possibility of therapies for Alzheimer’s patients that might or might not cure them but could very potentially provide a safe and happy life. As a caregiver myself, I looked forward to how such therapies would progress, does it slow down, halt, plateau the memory loss? The author also examines the issue of euthanasia as loss of memory finally turns fatal.

However, Time Shelter is not just about possible therapies. It escapes into magic realism as the author takes off on a fantastical note here where Brexit and other political events of the present nudge him to think of a Europe that lives in fragmented pasts.

So at Gaustine’s clinic one day arrives the powers that be, possible allusions to the Elon Musks and the Sam Altmans of our times, who throw up the possibilities of nations living in their chosen pasts. A referendum was held in every European nation where people chose which past of their country they would like to live in. It is interesting to note that the author focuses on the west and east of Europe and does not go beyond, either to Asia or to the Americas or other continents. 

Referendums are preceded by canvassing by different movements advocating different eras, different ideas, the Socs, referring to the Socialists, the Heroes the patriots in Bulgaria. Of course, the Movement of Reason and the Movement of Greens are driven to the margins with few takers. 

The author writes out the canvassing with re-enactments of episodes of history by the different movements. And it is here that he interestingly weaves in issues of migration, unemployment and a myriad other 21^st century anomalies. The movements hire professional theatre workers to act out the episodes and so many unemployed theatre people find work. And not just that, GG’s friend who runs a business planning and executing these elaborate enactments of history before the referendum also runs a side business where he provides mothers to orphans for an hour or a day for a price, or a companion to a lonely husband whose wife might have migrated in search of work, or a son to a set of lonely parents. The social, the economic and the historical are woven together in a clever mastery of the plot of referendum. Gospodinov says in an interview that Brexit indeed was his inspiration for this idea of referendum on the past of nations.  

Interestingly, the Socs and the Heroes are tied at the referendum. The author here pronounces how people, countries love unhappiness. “No nation wants to give up its unhappiness. It was raw material for everything, an excuse, an alibi, grounds for pretensions …”

Paris chose the early 80s, “that sweet timelessness of the outgoing Giscard d’Estain and the incoming Mitterand, Spain too chose the “release” of the 80s with La Movida Madrilena, Almodovar, Malasana … the first bare tits in post-Franco cinema, Portugal, according to GG, chose the mid-1970s, the Swedes chose ABBA and Ikea, Denmark chose the 70s … and for Germany it was the 80s with the stability of Helmut Kohl and the discos.

And so it went, the map of Europe was redrawn temporally. And the basic outcome of the referendum, the author, wrote was that the old chose the decades of their youth. Not much surprise there. But apparently, the youth too  chose to live in decades that they had not seen. But what happened when the borders of the various nations living in their respective decades opened up? The author says the Pandora’s Box opened up. And quite strategically, the geriatric psychiatrist disappears.

The historical re-enactments become more brutal and authentic so much so that the inevitable happens. Blank bullets are replaced by live bullets in a re-staging of an assassination and lives are lost. At first, a few and then some more. A re-staging of 1939 at the military depots near the Poland border, a re-enactment of the war to stop all wars, unleashes everything.

And while the flaneur writes out all of this, he first starts losing words, much like Iris Murdoch, and then names and then some faces … His letters jumble up, he loses his hearing (one of the triggers for Alzheimer’s or Dementia), he visits his infancy, he visits a neurosurgeon, who puts it down to stress. He forgets the name of his ex-wife who queues up to get a copy of his book signed. He forgets his name …

And Gaustine, what happens to him? Did he really exist or was it GG’s imagination? And was there really a clinic for dementia patients at Zurich? Hallucination, psychosis, fear, dread, confusion are all a part of the disease and as GG writes, each of these visit him and then exit, like the play of light and darkness, of lucidity and confusion in the mind of a dementia patient. The scribblings, the sketches of books, encyclopaedias as the author spends time at libraries , sketches of anonymous faces, are all keys to the Alzheimer’s mind as the writer negotiates memory and the loss of it. He writes down words that he forgets, writes down the scents that he associates with different things, he writes down phrases in different languages, sheets upon sheets are filled till one time he catches himself rewriting his journals of the past. He writes down what he has actually experienced so that he knows what he has been through and what he has made up in his writings. 

Time Shelter is brilliant in its scope, imagination, daring to play out a historical-contemporary novel that touches generations, revealing the politics of memory, the economics of depravation, the social tensions between people of different timescapes, of different cultures, analysing the experiences of nations, and anticipating their choices and options, reading the human mind with its complexities and machinations.

And Time Shelter scares as it writes uncompromisingly how the neurons and its absences play out in real time, what tricks the mind plays as there is less and less of memory to grapple with, how thoughts wander randomly till they disappear leaving an emptiness, an abyss …