Marc's Reviews > Time Shelter

Based on the rave reviews and the International Booker Prize I naturally expected a lot, and that is always a bit dangerous. Once again it ended in mild disappointment. But beware, what Gospodinov is presenting here is not nothing. I especially liked the humorous play with different aspects of time and temporality. And Gospodinov ingeniously combines social criticism with absurdist satire; think of the hilarious referenda in which each European country can choose its favorite time period to return to. The author shows a very good knowledge of the history of each country, and especially an empathy for the 'soul' of each nation (that soul is an ambiguous concept that he consciously plays with).

Gospodinov rightly zooms in on the deep-rooted phenomenon of melancholy in human actions and relationships with the world. He does this much more broadly than, for example, Krasznahorkai in his The Melancholy of Resistance, who only had populism in mind. Gospodinov also discusses populism (in the part on the hilarious election campaign in his home country Bulgaria, for example), but as part of a satire on the hypocrisy of both extreme nationalism and extreme communism, ending up as ‘brothers in arms’. Gospodinov cleverly illustrates that the longing for a certain past mainly stems from the desire for certainty in uncertain times, and thus the past rightly is killed a hiding place or a shelter, as the title of this novel indicates.

For me, the best thing about this novel was the game that Gospodinov plays with temporality, the relating to time. Here he joins the postmodernist movement that states that the past primarily is a construction of the present, and thus only is created in the future. More about that aspect in my History account on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...)

In conclusion: absolutely a meritorious novel (though not the masterpiece I had expected), which, more than anything else, shows how the past is a source of support for both the individual and the community, a false source of support perhaps, or better, most probably a false source of support, but a reality to reckon with.