Time Shelter
Gaustine is the main character of the book by Georgi Gospodinov. He’s a strange figure, able to travel through time (already making an appearance in the novel The Physics of Sorrow), who decides to open a very particular clinic in Zürich, a “clinic for the past”, created to welcome amnesia sufferers who wish to recover their memories. Gaustine’s facility will soon be imitated in other cities as well, and many will quickly be established, becoming a care facility and refuge for those who want to escape the present. In a future with the flavour of a now vanished past, memory loss and escape from time increasingly assume the character of a global emergency, a collective crisis that leads the governments of various European countries to call a bizarre “referendum on the past”, to choose the people’s favourite decade. The story unfolds without a linear plot, becoming a frame for other stories, and the narrative is punctuated by fictional critical essays and maxims of the main character. It’s a dreamlike, poetic novel, which establishes a dialogue with Borges, cited explicitly with a reference to Funes, the main character of one of the stories contained in “Finzioni” (Fictions), a man with a prodigious memory, able to remember every single moment of his life. Gospodinov overturns Borges’ outlook on time and memory, creating a story in which memory loss leads the book’s characters to slide into oblivion, fading into endless sorrow.
Cronorifugio (Time Shelter)
Georgi Gospodinov
Voland, 2021