What If We Could Relive Our Golden Ages?


TIME Shelter
by Georgi Gospodinov
Translated by Angela Rodel

One of the more promising treatments for dementia has been “remembering therapy,” which uses artifacts and photographs to improve mood and awareness. Some have even built “villages with dementia” that recreate the environments of the patients’ youth days: cinemas, restaurants, bus stops. Its proponents claimed that such settings promote the humanity of the patients, while others criticized them as “Truman Show”-style stage production.

Beneath these more gripping intrusions, of course, there is some degree of deception, and not all memories released are happy. The morality of artificially returning people to the past and whether it really brings consolation—whether nostalgia indulgence is curative or harmful—is the central question of Georgi Gospodinov’s newly translated novel “The Shelter of Time”..

Gospodinov does not bother much with the usual fictitious ornaments. He introduces a geriatric psychiatrist named Gaustine, but makes it clear that he is a figment of the narrator’s imagination, “which I first invented and then met with flesh and blood.” Before he could grasp what that meant, the two men meet in Zurich, where the narrator, a writer, seeks literary inspiration, and the doctor has found investors to help him recreate the past. Gaustine plans to meticulously reproduce historical sites for dementia patients “in sync with their inner time,” helping them “remember” parts of them that were “torn” over their lifetimes. (The skillful execution of such wordplay is testament to the talent of the novel’s translator, Angela Rodel.) As her accusations come back into the spotlight, word of mouth of Gaustine’s achievements spreads and she opens new clinics in Europe, including in Gospodinov’s hometown of Bulgaria.

With his success, Gaustine begins to worry about the psychological ramifications of switching decades back and forth too easily. She brings the narrator to one of the simulated areas of 1968, complete with old cigarettes and gin, implying that they must build cities, or even entire countries, of the past. Soon, Gaustine complains about humanity’s failed dreams of the 21st century. “Part of the failure of the future is the failure of medicine,” he announces. He and visitors to his “time bunkers” come to see the past as a cure not just for dementia but for contemporary anomie and anxiety.



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