Time Shelter and the Grammar of a Vanishing Present

Part of: The Deep Reader

Author Hub: Georgi Gospodinov

Spoiler notice: This review discusses the structure and final pages of Time Shelter.

Gaustine sells the narrator three packs of Tomasian cigarettes from 1937 and throws in an authentic German match from 1928. Asked how “the spirit of ’37” tastes, the narrator answers, “Harsh”: an accurate report on old, filterless tobacco that Gaustine immediately hears as history. Perhaps the harshness comes from Guernica, he suggests, or from the Hindenburg disaster; such things must have clung to the leaves. The narrator nearly chokes, stubs out the cigarette and says nothing. Gaustine continues to sound like an eyewitness.

Within this small exchange lies one of Georgi Gospodinov’s principal methods in Time Shelter. An ordinary sensation acquires a date, catastrophe gathers around the date, and comic timing keeps the idea from hardening into allegory. History briefly becomes physical without surrendering its absurdity, and Gaustine emerges as someone who inhabits old years so completely that metaphor and matter exchange properties around him.

Angela Rodel’s English translation makes this movement depend on verbal timing as much as invention. Concrete nouns secure the object, Gaustine’s grave associations prolong his answer, and the narrator’s abrupt bodily reaction ends it. Accumulation repeatedly gives the past density across the novel; an interruption changes the value of what has accumulated.

I bought the book partly because I had never read a Bulgarian author, despite Bulgaria being a neighbor of my own country. The dedication and epigraph had already intrigued me before the opening confirmed my pleasure. Prizes usually make me skeptical; here I felt glad that a book I admired had won one. That initial admiration survives the reservations which gathered as I read.

Gaustine builds a clinic whose rooms reproduce past decades for patients losing their memories. The possibility of living in another time spreads beyond the patients, until European countries hold referendums to choose a decade. On this larger scale, the same gift becomes more vulnerable. Lists once passing through a particular body begin to reproduce their pattern—country, preferred decade, emblematic objects, historical explanation, ironic afterthought. Gospodinov planned this enlargement, and the design has clear intellectual force; its literary pressure varies with the language. The opening chapters make time palpable, parts of the continental survey classify it, and the final movement gives the subject another form as words, voices, tenses and even chapter numbers lose their borders.

A Room Made of Nouns

Inside the clinic, a dark green coat rack covered in fake leather and brass studs stands in the entryway, carrying a light green coat with two rows of wooden buttons. Twin beds meet at a brown chest; yellow synthetic comforters retain the childhood word ledeka. Nearby stand a Mickey Mouse alarm clock and Matchbox cars whose doors open and whose rubber tires roll. The narrator possessed the same cars only as pictures on bubble-gum wrappers.

Together, these nouns create a child’s geography of Eastern and Western Europe. One boy handles the miniature cars; the other memorizes their specifications from wrappers. A German mail-order catalog loses its commercial purpose because its objects cannot be bought, becoming “pure aesthetics” and, for the ten-year-old reader, erotica. “Abroad” receives a capital letter and behaves like the name of an inaccessible country, so scarcity changes the use of language and objects together.

Memory gathers through association, with each object catching on the next: the toy car calls up the truck driver who crossed the border, followed by Levi’s jeans, Toblerone, singing gondola night-lights, Acropolis ashtrays and the catalog beside the telephone. Long sentences follow the speed of recollection, and parentheses admit the older narrator’s correction, embarrassment or gentle mockery of the child he was. Surrender to recovered detail and awareness of reconstruction coexist inside the syntax.

Before this inventory can settle into period décor, the green coat summons the narrator’s mother as a woman in her twenties, younger than her son is now. Adult age collapses inside one sentence: “when your mother appears at twenty, you automatically turn into a child.” Gospodinov transfers the change to the body when his fifty-year-old narrator throws himself onto a bed and lands in the tickling fringe as an eight-year-old. Contact, posture and scale complete the persuasion; the room’s objects work because somebody touches them.

The Joke Keeps the Past Unstable

A single exact word often provides Gospodinov’s humor with its hinge. Gaustine orders a creamer at dinner and drinks it in tiny sips, quietly revising the narrator’s estimate of his antiques business. Augustine and Garibaldi form the two halves of his name, joining “early theology and late revolutionism” through a parental disagreement. Later, an underground refrigeration system for a communist leader’s embalmed body becomes “Bulgaria’s first air-conditioning.” The household term makes the machinery of political immortality sound like a belated domestic convenience.

Parentheses admit private knowledge, doubt and afterthought without requiring the story to stop for a correction. From a world-historical date, the narrator can turn toward a headache, a lover’s betrayal inside a dream, or his own failure to remember. The passage on Auden’s diary places the invasion of Poland beside a bad night and Ch.’s infidelity inside a dream; Gospodinov lets the collision spread through One Thousand and One Nights, a Manhattan bar and advertisements purchased before the war began. Allusion keeps changing the scene’s scale without feeling imported. History and irritation share the sentence because a lived day never sorts them onto separate shelves.

Humor also restrains Gaustine’s solemnity. Watching mayflies during the sunset of their entire lives, he invites an image that the narrator dismisses as worn out. Gaustine waits several minutes before answering, “For them, there are no metaphors.” The silence gives the narrator’s objection time to stand, and the insects supply the literal duration that earns the polished line. Later passages sometimes announce their wisdom with less resistance; here, conversational delay gives an aphorism roots.

What an Inventory Cannot Record

Meetings between Mr. N and the former agent assigned to follow him push accumulation toward its limit. Surveillance has left an enormous store of particulars, and illness makes the target dependent on the man who once violated his privacy. Gospodinov builds their moral complication through the speed and reach of Mr. N’s questions, allowing syntax to discover the archive’s border:

Tell me, Mr. N. says, what kind of shirts did I wear, what shoes, did I grin or grit my teeth in a frown, did I look down as I walked, was I hunched over . . . was I happy? he finally blurts out. This startles the agent, he can say everything there is to say about the shirts, jackets, overcoats, cigarettes, beer and vodka that the target ordered, but . . . There’s no one else who remembers these details, even mistresses and wives forget after a time. Only the secret agent knows the details. Let’s try to put ourselves in his shoes. He has to sit there and watch, to describe what he sees. And what he sees is woefully insignificant. Indeed, what could really happen in the day of a man of fifty at that time? He goes out. He walks down the sidewalk. He stops. He takes out a match, cups his hand, lights up a cigarette.

— Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2022), p. 57.

Visible traits accumulate in the first sentence until the ellipsis after “hunched over” creates a narrow silence, into which happiness enters as a different order of question. A second ellipsis marks the end of the agent’s competence. He could extend the list of shirts and cigarettes indefinitely, though the syntax has already crossed beyond observation. Gospodinov then imitates the surveillance report in clipped declarative sentences—goes out, walks, stops, lights up—reducing a life to recordable actions while the intimate question continues sounding above them.

“Let’s try to put ourselves in his shoes” moves narrator and reader into the agent’s boredom, making those thousands of reports into “the great unwritten Bulgarian novel” of the communist decades, mediocre and inept like the era that produced it. Political surveillance becomes an accidental literary archive, preserving gestures that affection has forgotten. When the agent later recalls sexual coercion, Mr. N’s body recoils. The prose first grants the archive a terrible intimacy and then forces that intimacy back through nausea.

K’s story of his father introduces the same break through register. Asked why he would return to the brutal 1950s, the normally caustic professor answers in the voice of the boy who refused to open the door to a frightening stranger. The man supplies a scar, metal coat buttons and family stories as proof that he is the child’s father, returned from a labor camp. K’s adult correction—“Now I realize how stupid and cruel I was”—interrupts the child’s defensive reasoning, then the remembered voice takes over again: a crying man must be good, his mother would object to leaving someone like that outside. He opens the door without quite believing. Two ages occupy this account, and the adult can neither withdraw his childhood fear nor finish explaining it away. Afterward, K calls the waiter; food and banter release him from the recollection. The hated decade contains the father who died a year after returning.

A Manufactured Mistake

Demby, once rejected by the theater academy and now a supplier of historical rallies, knows that insignificant flaws persuade more effectively than perfection. The narrator praises the crackling loudspeakers; Demby proudly adds the mistake during the sound check and the technician’s swearing. Among identical socialist demonstrations, people remember the gaffe, so he gives them one. A manufactured imperfection seals the performance with authenticity.

Their conversation turns literary technique into comic workshop talk. Demby enjoys his devices, speaks too much and brushes aside the narrator’s aesthetic objection with “I do theater, not revolutions,” before admitting that his crowd includes hired extras. His monologue repeatedly lowers the scale: political resurrection becomes professional vanity, ideology becomes an invoice, mass participation becomes casting. The narrator drinks his juice and offers notes while historical manipulation takes the form of a conversation between two makers.

Exact texture can persuade without declaring the truth it serves. Clinic rooms offer patients a habitable time; Demby’s engineered glitches make political reenactment feel remembered. Both practices depend on neglected particulars, so craftsmanship alone cannot divide care from exploitation. The clinic itself has already complicated that division: its reconstructed Iron Curtain prompts an escape attempt and a broken leg. Demby, meanwhile, previously tried renting substitute relatives to lonely people without taking a markup. His scheme failed at a task the clinic also faces—making an invented encounter answer to somebody’s need. The novel subjects its own gift for persuasive debris to scrutiny through a character who also practices it for hire.

When Europe Becomes a Catalog

The referendum enlarges this art of reconstruction from rooms to countries and contains some of the book’s sharpest inventions. Its variable force comes from the changing behavior of accumulation. Clinic lists travel through hunger, touch, shame, desire or speech; across stretches of the European survey, one set of references follows another without undergoing a comparable change. Cultural emblems identify a decade, a joke adjusts the angle, the vote supplies a result, and the prose proceeds to the next country.

The Swedish survey gives this weakness an audible form. IKEA’s catalog, store and detachable table legs lead to a ready-made verdict on a decade: “practical, sturdy, cheap, a bit raw, and simple.” The adjectives classify the objects and the era together, leaving little uncertainty about how to receive either. Soon ABBA competes with appliances for the next winning decade, and three successive “despite” clauses sweep economic crises and changes of government aside so that the “dancing queen” can overtake the refrigerator and Volvo. The race is amusing, but its fluency also makes the outcome easy to anticipate. Cultural references have become contestants in an argument whose terms are already supplied.

Even Sweden resists this pattern when the narrator remembers being a boy and secretly preferring the blonde member of ABBA while knowing it was cooler to claim the brunette. Desire divides from the performance of taste within a single recollection. Immediately afterward, a Danish friend’s account of the 1960s runs through pregnancy, an absent father, Moscow and expulsion; the decade acquires the speed and bad timing of her life. Elsewhere, the narrator peels an apple through a sequence that passes the gesture from his hand to his father’s and then his grandfather’s. Such interruptions show how the continental chapters can retain the intimacy of the clinic. A voice or a hand changes what the period label can contain.

My impatience began earlier, in Part II, where explanation and hypothetical history sometimes made me wonder how much could disappear without damaging the fiction. The wish to cut that whole part was too sweeping; the objection was to arguments whose removal seemed easier to imagine than the loss of an encounter. I wanted the history and philosophy to acquire the dramatic necessity I associate with Thomas Mann, rather than interrupting the novel as summaries. The national chapters remain clever, informed and frequently pleasurable. Their weaker stretches ask wit to carry work once performed by encounter: a lucid account of a society’s preferences leaves less room for the conflicting impulses of a person who holds them.

Gaustine Moves into the Grammar

Gaustine’s increasingly explicit opinions had already reduced some of the mystery of the man with the cigarettes; long stretches of bodily absence later thin the relationship itself. Gospodinov gives that absence a striking formal use when the narrator retreats to a monastery with the yellow notebook, initially marking Gaustine’s entries “G.” and his own “G.G.” He soon stops because their handwriting is indistinguishable. A typographical border fails as the narrator’s identity becomes harder to secure.

Their argument now occurs inside the notebook. “God has dementia,” G. writes; G.G. objects, softens the diagnosis and admits that whatever he does not dare to say turns into Gaustine. Signatures and blank spaces assume the work of dialogue, followed by imagined banter in which Gaustine demands half the magazine fee and complains about the clothes his author has assigned him. This teasing first-person uncertainty made me think of Nabokov: the narrator’s control becomes one of his inventions. Gaustine’s signed writings also recover a poetic reach his more declarative opinions had lost. Writing briefly secures the narrator’s identity; the moment he stops, certainty loosens. An earlier version of this unstable authorship appears in Natural Novel, where the missing writer and the editor who publishes his pages share Gospodinov’s name.

Memory loss later alters grammatical person. An embarrassing meeting with an ex-wife begins in the first person, where the narrator remembers her body but cannot retrieve her name, then returns in the third person as material belonging to “him.” The change enacts the escape he has just proposed into another person. Recognition becomes uneasy for the reader: we know the incident already, though the grammar now assigns it to someone else. The switch makes estrangement perceptible alongside the book’s explicit accounts of forgetting.

Gaustine’s grammatical afterlife leaves the early relationship thinner in dramatic terms. Their exchanges had changed direction because neither speaker controlled the other; within the notebook, both sides increasingly originate from one consciousness. Converting an absent character into initials, punctuation and grammatical uncertainty is among the novel’s boldest achievements, although some dramatic resistance leaves with his body.

The Words Begin to Leave

Late in the novel, subtraction replaces accumulation. Rooms and decades had been built by adding objects, dates, quotations and remembered phrases; identity now contracts through falling numbers: “I’m seven,” then “I’m six,” then “I must be three years old.” As the memories shorten, they become more physical. A crowded fair, a forced haircut and fear of a waiting mother give way to bare feet, warm soil, a hand and a rose at eye level. Childhood returns as explanation falls away. I wanted the preceding disintegration to develop more fully into such bodily immediacy; the three-year-old’s fragment itself needs no enlargement.

Letters receive bodies at the point of departure. The narrator imagines them leaving books like insects: Щ crawls as a centipede, O rolls like a beetle, Й removes its little hat. Language returns to the physical comedy that animated the 1937 cigarette and the furnished rooms. The reader must still recognize the letters to watch them leave.

In the epilogue, literary beginnings drift into one another until reading, invention and experience become impossible to sort. Chapter 0 prepares a full-scale reenactment of September 1939, then one sentence twists chronology into an impossible tense: “Tomorrow was September 1.” Section −1 follows with the same string of Cyrillic letters, digits and punctuation that the narrator produced while playing at his mother’s typewriter near the beginning of the novel. Apparent wreckage retains a strict design. The child’s keyboard play returns at the end of the older narrator’s struggle to keep words and memories in order; identical marks acquire opposite pressures through their placement. What first belonged to the pleasure of hitting keys becomes the only typing left to us.

The cigarette from 1937 made history cling to matter through an extravagant association that the narrator could still interrupt by putting it out. By the final page, 1939 has grown to life-size, a future event has entered the past tense, and the words that distinguished invention from experience have dispersed. Gospodinov’s sentence had accommodated so many objects and voices; its final contraction leaves the reader with the remembered sound of a child striking keys and no voice able to explain what the marks now say.

Sources

Edition discussed: Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel (Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2022; ebook ISBN 978-1-324-09096-0).

Georgi Gospodinov, “Georgi Gospodinov interview: ‘I felt something had gone awry in the clockworks of time’,” The Booker Prizes, April 18, 2023.