Georgi Gospodinov: Time Shelter

Since his novel The Physics of Sorrow was published in 2012, Georgi Gospodinov (*1968 in Yambol, Bulgaria) has become one of the most highly read authors from Southeastern Europe. That novel used Greek mythology and especially the creature of the Minotaur as a means to make universal his memories of a dismal childhood and adolescence spent in socialist Bulgaria. His new novel, Time Shelter, is considerably more political, a book that is at once European and Bulgarian. The author begins by leading his readers up the garden path: at first glance the story seems like a retread of Marcel Proust, reviving individual memory through physical stimuli (Proust’s famous madeleine) and then transposing this material to a collective and national level, on which so-called re-enactments of historic events and key dates are supposed to reanimate the cultural memory of the individual nation. Then Gospodinov mounts a vicious satire of today’s Bulgaria, wavering between communist nostalgia on the one hand and nationalism referring to the liberation war of the 1870s on the other, ultimately ending in a dystopic withdrawal from the European Union (EU).

But first things first: the materiality of a no longer existing past is a subject that can be considered typically postsocialist or East European, and, indeed, Gospodinov has published a volume called An Inventory Book of Socialism (Inventarna kniga na socializma, Sofia 2006) as well as the oral history collection I lived Socialism. 171 personal stories (Az živjach socializma. 171 lični istorii, Plovdiv 2006). As it turns out, a “Neckermann” catalogue possessed greater symbolic value in the German Democratic Republic or in the Bulgaria of the 1970s than it did in West Germany. In Time Shelter, Gospodinov skilfully combines his Bulgarian experiences with their pan-European counterparts: his novel begins in Vienna but is mostly set in Zurich. The two protagonists are the eccentric Gaustin and the third-person omniscient narrator, a young Bulgarian author who knows Europe from his book tours and writing residencies and seems to be Gospodinov himself.

The two develop the psychotherapeutic concept of “clinics that produce the past”. This experimental therapy for Alzheimer’s patients becomes more and more successful but when it is exported internationally, and is even used to build entire villages of the past, a break occurs. The hitherto consistently positive perception of the healing powers of a deliverance from real time and a return and an intensification of one’s own memory through an artificially created past becomes something else: EU officials appear at the memory clinic and identify the escape into the past as a cure for the EU’s existential crisis of legitimacy. A referendum in each EU member country is supposed to clarify which period the individual nations would like to return to. Gospodinov describes this process in different ways: the Bulgarian example takes the form of the narrator’s hundred-page travelogue, while the other European referendums are summed up in a total of fifty pages.

The Bulgarian chapter broaches the issue of the émigré’s alienation towards his home country: “There were two Bulgarias and none of them were mine […] This was supposed to be my town, and my past set on these streets […] But obviously, we weren’t talking to each other anymore” (Part 3, “A Country in Isolation”, Chapter 19). The two opposing groups are the postcommunists, who are passionate about the totalitarian welfare state of the 1950s to the 1980s, pitted against the neonationalists, who focus on the anti-Ottoman resistance of the 1870s and pursue indigenous and anti-Islamic politics—this situation actually applies to the whole of Eastern Europe (apart from Russia and Belarus). That both positions correlated unambiguously during Bulgarian national communism under Todor Živkov is made clear by Gospodinov when he envisions both parties suddenly forming a coalition after a stalemate in the referendum process. Two omnipresent slogans from national communist times—“The Bulgaria of the three Seas” and “1300 Years of Bulgaria”—appear again and again: the first referring to a Great Bulgarian mental map spanning from the Adriatic and the Aegean Sea to the Black Sea, the second to the 1981 anniversary when Bulgaria celebrated its 1300-year history beginning with the proto-Bulgarian Khan Asparuh in 681. Gospodinov thus reveals the resilience of such national communist ethnocentrism: ultimately it is precisely this generation of historians and politicians influenced by the fetishized “1300 years of Bulgaria” conception who today determine the discourse about Macedonia in Sofia. The memory clinics, seemingly harmless at first, appear in an entirely different light when the author’s old classmate turns out to be an architect of both nostalgic movements. Like Gaustin and his assistant, he produces memory—but does so as a national fetish (even Georgi Dimitrov’s mausoleum, demolished in 1999, is rebuilt in Sofia’s city centre).

Part 4 of the book begins by evoking the familiar opening line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, but “family” is replaced with “state”: “Happy states are all alike; every unhappy state is unhappy in its own way” (Part 4, “Referendum for a Past”, Chapter Two). Which decade do the Western and Central Europeans feel the most nostalgic about? While the Bulgarian psyche is dissected across nearly a hundred pages, only a few pages are left for the individual European nations. Nevertheless, Gospodinov is able to conjure the zeitgeist of the 1960s–1990s by means of events in sport, music, and media as well as including pointed remarks (such as the “barely noticed” German vote that recorded as its second-highest result a wish for a return to the 1930s).

The last part of the book is a continual regression in which everything falls apart due to the threat of the genie that can no longer be put back into its bottle: first Gaustin, a character from Gospodinov’s earlier stories (an antiquarian who can send original letters and postcards from the 1920s in And Other Stories), disappears. Then the first-person narrator begins to lose his mind, the perspectives and pronouns waver between the first and third person, time has completely come undone: the epilogue uses the numbers 0 and −1, the last sentence is “Tomorrow was September 1”, referring to 1939, and the book ends with a meaningless series of letters produced by a Cyrillic typewriter.

Ultimately, the book is a parable of Eastern Europe’s disappointment. The political shift had given their citizens hopes that they suddenly might become young again, ideally even sexy and rich. Despite the jet-black satire of Bulgaria—and only this country is put in the spotlight to lay bare all its bigotry and ridiculousness—this novel constitutes a European space of memory. This is why Gospodinov’s novel must not be misunderstood as a one-sided warning against nostalgia.

As in The Physics of Sorrow, the key to success here lies in transposition: Gospodinov’s new book also takes its spark from the Bulgarian experience, but that experience achieves universal relevance through the techniques of delocalisation and glocalisation. In this way Gospodinov is able, from his particular vantage on the Balkan periphery, to narrate huge topics such as identity, memory, nostalgia, and Europe in a surprisingly new way: the described future is dystopic yet, at the same time, utterly European. Gospodinov’s distinctive ironic and associative style of writing makes this intellectual adventure a highly enjoyable read.