Shelter of time

An international award-winning novel - with a dystopian twist in the second act - Time Shelter is a masterpiece set in a world that longs for the past before it forgets it. “At some point, they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the Earth was created,” begins the mysterious narrator of “The Shelter of Time,” who shall remain anonymous. “In the mid-17th century, Irish Bishop Usher not only calculated the year accurately, but also set a date for the beginning of time: October 22, 4,004 years before the birth of Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Justin, a “time vagrant” who has distanced himself from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered clothes, and wandering the lost alleys of the twentieth century. In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by whimsically planted forget-me-nots, Gustin opened the first “Clinic for the Past,” an institution offering an innovative treatment for Alzheimer’s patients: each floor reproduces a decade past in meticulous detail, allowing patients to travel back in time to recover what remains of their faded memories. The narrator works as Gustin's assistant, and his mission is to collect remnants of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even strands of afternoon light. But as this trick becomes more convincing, more and more healthy people turn to the clinic to escape the monotony of their daily lives, a development that leads to an unexpected dilemma when the past begins to invade the present. Through sharp, maze-like satirical scenes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator tells in stunning prose how he became involved in a plot to stop time itself. “A natural prankster, and often very funny” (Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker), the prolific Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov brilliantly captures the tragedies of the past century, including those of our own, in a captivating, surprising, and insightful novel. The Shelter of Time, brilliantly translated by Angela Rudel, is a timeless literary masterpiece from “one of Europe’s most interesting and irreplaceable novelists” (Dave Eggers).