Georgi Gospodinov - Time Shelter (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2022) ****

The great thing about literature is that it is not bound by any rules (in spite of all the 'creative writing' courses), and that it has the flexibility to ignore even basic concepts such as characters and plot. This may sound like a recipe for failure, but in rare situations also for success. 

Gospodinov invites us - readers - to join him in his almost personal musings on the value of time - past, present and future - and our human interaction with it, both personal and historical. 

From the start he invents his alter ego Gaustine, who works with patients suffering from dementia, and to help them, he re-creates the decade in which the patients feel most comfortable, by redecorating the floor of his dementia center in the style of the fifities, sixties or seventies. His correspondence and meetings with Gaustine allow him to tell the story and the memories of some of the patients. 

One specific one is the former Bulgarian dissident, who has now meetings with the state security agent who surveiled him, to hear how his former life was. Like many of the other stories, Gospodinov takes the opportunity to attack the former communist system, and the attitudes and politics of his country. 

Next to some of the staf in the dementia center, a second big part of the book takes the choice for the ideal decade to a political level, and all European member states organise referendums amon their citizens to have them choose the ideal decade that should be re-created, resulting in some weird choices and the rise of political factions such as the Bulgarians who want to move back to communism and those who want to go back to the times of heroic nationalist uprisings. 

Yet these big schematic and often abstract concepts in the book are just anchor points for the author to muse about time, with some nostalgia about his childhood years, and the material world in which he lived, and taking things to a more philosophical level, allowing himself the freedom - and that's the great thing about literature - to present some absurd and even irrational ideas. 

"Perhaps due to the whole stress of finding a car to drive my mother to the hospi­tal, my father withdrew all of the family savings, took out a loan, and bought a used Warszawa, which dramatically increased the per capita percentage of personal automobiles in the village. The Warszawa was a powerful, corpulent, and booming car, not like that red Pontiac, and according to one neighbor the military kept tabs on them, so in case of a mobilization any Warszawa would be nationalized, some light artillery mounted on the roof, which would automatically turn it into a little tank and the driver into a tank driver. This had my father very worried, since it was already May '68, spring had sprung in Prague, and that very same neighbor (agent or joker, we never did figure that out) said that we'd have to go free our Czech brothers. Free them from who? my father asked naively. What do you mean from who, from their own selves, the neighbor replied and my father could already envision himself set­ting out for Prague in his mobilized Warszawa". 

Or one more excerpt to give you an idea of how reality leads to insightful concepts:  

"I passed through the little park in front of St. Sofia and came out behind the statue of Tsar Samuel that had been erected a few years ago. The sculptor had put two little LED lights in the eyes, to the horror of passersby and cats. Thank God the lights burned out after two months and nobody had bothered to change them. 

If anything can save this country from all the kitsch that is raining down on it, that is laziness and apathy alone. That which destroys it will also protect it. In apathetic and lazy nations, nei­ther kitsch nor evil can win out for long, because they take effort and upkeep. That was my optimistic theory, but a little voice inside my head kept saying: When it comes to making trouble, even a lazy man works hard". 

 And one more:

"Memory holds you, freezes you within the fixed outlines of a single, solitary person whom you cannot leave. Oblivion comes to liberate you. Features lose their sharpness and definitiveness, vagueness blurs the shape. If I don't clearly remember who exactly I am, I could be anyone, even myself, even myself as a child. Sud­denly those games of Borges's, which you loved so much in your youth, those doubling games, become real, they happen to you yourself. What was once a metaphor has now become an illness, to turn Sontag on her head. There are no longer any metaphors here, as G. had said, when we met for the first time and discussed the death of mayflies at the end of the day. Here you really are no longer sure which side of history you're on. Here 'I' becomes the most meaningless word, an empty shell that the waves roll along the shore. 

The great leaving is upon you. They leave you one by one, all the bodies you have been. They dismiss themselves and take their leave. 

The angel of those who leave and the angel of those who are left - sometimes one and the same ... "

Gospodinov's style is cynical and light at the same time. He can have the gentle phrasing and moments of surprise that remind me of Seebald, or absurd concepts that remind me of Borges, but these are just references. As said, don't expect a novel with characters and a plot, but what you get instead is possibly even more meaningful and entertaining: musings and creative thoughts on inescapable time, the monster that devours humans and civilisations.