Jeff Harding narrates an unusual contemplation on the nature of time and memory as a clinic lets Alzheimer's patients relive their memories by decorating each floor in the style of a different decade. An unnamed assistant is tasked with time-traveling to collect the minutiae for each floor, but when the clinic becomes too real, the general public begins visiting as entertainment. Harding embodies the narrator well but struggles with differentiating the various female characters. He is wonderful at evoking the twisting introspective writing. The story is often wry but is also intricate and bizarre. Harding works to keep the narration engaging in this quirky and reflective science-fiction tale. J.M.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

04/25/2022

A radical new therapy tests the power of nostalgia in the electric and fantastical latest from Gospodinov (The Physics of Sorrow). In present-day Vienna, geriatric psychiatrist Gaustine redecorates his clinic in the style of the 1960s, replete with miniature pink Cadillacs and Beatles memorabilia. Patients with memory issues appear invigorated by the decor and share more during therapy. The narrator, an unnamed amateur novelist who had the same idea as Gaustine years earlier, comes across an article about the psychiatrist and seeks him out. They strike up an unusual collaboration: Gaustine establishes clinics that painstakingly recreate bygone eras with artifacts tracked down by the novelist. The clinics rapidly expand and start offering services to healthy people, and eventually entire countries opt to simulate returns to supposedly happier eras (France, Germany, and Spain all choose the 1980s). The clever prose sells the zany premise and imbues it with poignant longing: “Everything happens years after it has happened.... Most likely 1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid.” Thought-provoking and laced with potent satire, this deserves a spot next to Kafka. (May)

"Mr. Gospodinov, one of Bulgaria’s most popular contemporary writers, is a nostalgia artist. In the manner of Orhan Pamuk and Andreï Makine, his books are preoccupied with memory, its ambiguous pleasures and its wistful, melancholy attraction....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."

"A chronicle of time itself: this is the ambitious task undertaken by Georgi Gospodinov, Bulgaria’s greatest living writer and annalist of an entire nation’s endless complaints and missed chances, in his Strega Prize–winning novel Time Shelter.... Finished in Berlin just as COVID was on the verge of sweeping through Europe, the novel is at times unnervingly prescient as it issues warnings against the perils of infection — physical, political, even metaphysical.... A poet at heart, Gospodinov can also write a novel in a single sentence: ‘The past is my home country….’ He uses the absurdities of the very specific universe of Bulgarian pain, of Bulgarian provincial poverty, to unveil deep wounds…. Angela Rodel, the most prolific and accomplished translator of Bulgarian literature into English, carries over Gospodinov’s grand, flowing Bulgarian sentences… into vivid English…. Rodel is part of a grouping of extraordinary women translators working to preserve linguistic diversity.... who are today producing and exporting some of the most compelling and interesting contemporary literature from Bulgaria."

"The 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."

"In this antic fantasy of European politics, narrated by a fictionalized version of the author, an enigmatic friend of his designs 'a clinic of the past,' which soothes Alzheimer’s patients with environments from a time they can still remember.... 'History is still news,' Gospodinov writes, cunningly drawing attention to the violence that the past wreaks on the present."

"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… Adroit execution of such wordplay is a testament to the talent of the novel’s translator, Angela Rodel. [Gospodinov] is sympathetic to the poignancy of things from before — obsolete objects, old brands of coffee, the skipping of antique records — 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. It’s impossible, when reading all this, not to think of the reactionary sentiments behind Brexit and MAGA and even Putin’s Greater Russia irredentism, but Gospodinov is too delicate to resort to crude political satire.… Touching and intelligent."

"[An] antic fantasy of European politics.... 'History is still news,' Gospodinov writes, cunningly drawing attention to the violence that the past wreaks on the present."

Jeff Harding narrates an unusual contemplation on the nature of time and memory as a clinic lets Alzheimer's patients relive their memories by decorating each floor in the style of a different decade. An unnamed assistant is tasked with time-traveling to collect the minutiae for each floor, but when the clinic becomes too real, the general public begins visiting as entertainment. Harding embodies the narrator well but struggles with differentiating the various female characters. He is wonderful at evoking the twisting introspective writing. The story is often wry but is also intricate and bizarre. Harding works to keep the narration engaging in this quirky and reflective science-fiction tale. J.M.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

2022-03-16
A clinic invites Europeans to live in the past, with all the comforts and perils that doing so brings.

The unnamed narrator of Bulgarian author Gospodinov’s third novel translated into English has stumbled into the orbit of Gaustine, who’s opened a facility in Zurich for people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia—“those who already are living solely in the present of their past,” as he puts it. Memory care is a legitimate treatment for such patients, but Gospodinov’s digressive, philosophical novel is less a work of realist literature than an allegory about the perils of looking backward and attempting to make Switzerland (or Sweden or Germany...) great again. As the popularity of the clinic expands—with different floors dedicated to different decades of the 20th century—the narrator alternates between sketches of various patients and ruminations about modern European history (particularly that of his native Bulgaria) and how time is treated by authors like Thomas Mann, W.H. Auden, and Homer. Eventually, the novel expands into a kind of dark satire of nostalgia and patriotism as more clinics emerge and various European countries hold referendums to decide which point in time it wishes to live in. (France picks the 1980s; Switzerland, forever neutral, votes to live in the day of the referendum.) But, of course, attempting to live in the past doesn’t mean you can stay there. 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. As Gaustine puts it: “The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells, and fills the freed-up niches with ersatz-memory.”

An ambitious, quirky, time-folding yarn.