Booker-winning novel Time Shelter and the Quest to Reclaim the Past

Bulgarian writer Georgi Gaspadinov’s novel Time Shelter (translated into English by Angela Rodel), awarded the 2023 International Booker last week, asks the following poignant question “When does the everyday become history?” The unnamed narrator here is writing a novel about the “discreet monster of the past”, about what happens when the past is meticulously reconstructed for therapeutic purposes. While this is underway, the narrator is also the second-in-command at an experimental treatment facility for Alzheimer’s and dementia patients in Zurich, a building where each floor has been designed to resemble a particular decade, a particular moment in time. The building is the brain-child of the mysterious Gaustine, the narrator’s longtime acquaintance who’s described as “a time-vagrant”, a person so attuned to living in the past (old clothes, dated magazines and newspapers) that their grip on present-day reality grows looser with every passing day.

Time Shelter is a novel, quite simply, about time itself: how every individual processes the passage of time differently and the infinite ways in which people are captives to the past, no matter what reassurances we give ourselves publicly and privately. The narrator, a writer of fiction and poetry, is asked by Gaustine to help him with the building-of-stories.

“You have experience with time capsules that they used to bury, right? Well, that’s the sort of thing I mean. Travel around, gather up scents and stories, we need stories from different years, with that ‘premonition of a miracle,’ as you made me say in one of your stories in some literary rag, he added with a laugh. All kinds of stories, big, small, lighter, let them be lighter this time. After all, for some of the folks here they will be the last stories they ever enter into.”

That last bit about these being “the last stories” patients ever enter into is especially significant, since it ‘flattens’ the playing field, so to speak. Soon, it’s not just dementia or Alzheimer’s patients who are flocking to this Zurich facility. It’s also regular people, often scarred by war, who seek to recreate some of their fondest childhood memories. And it is these memories that keep pulling them back into the throes of madness—a Catch-22 situation which Gaustine and the narrator set about ‘correcting’.  Therein lies the novel’s most enthralling and thought-provoking section.

Along the way there are some stunning meditations, like a passage where the narrator divides the cities of Europe according to age-group, or the role they play in a person’s life. So-and-so-city is a city for youthful folly, another for mature reflection and so on. Zurich, unsurprisingly considering the nature of Gaustine’s enterprise, is marked as the city of old age and eventually, death.

“Zurich is a city for growing old. The world has slowed down, the river of life has settled into a lake, lazy and calm on the surface, the luxury of boredom and sun on the hill for old bones. Time in all of its relativity. It is no coincidence whatsoever that two major discoveries of the twentieth century tied precisely to time were made here, of all places, in Switzerland —Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.”

Like Einstein and Thomas Mann being spoken of together in that last line, Time Shelter presents several examples of art, literature, music et al being used as temporal markers—indelible symbols of a specific period in time, especially to those traumatised by war (as so many of the patients at the Zurich facility are). The narrator himself speaks fondly of The Beatles at one point, and confesses his inability to identify with contemporary music, preferring to lose himself in the culture of decades, even centuries past.

One especially thrilling passage sees the narrator studying the diaries of renowned poet WH Auden, especially his diary entry on Sep 1, 1939, even as World War II begins.

“I woke up with a headache after a night of bad dreams, in which Ch. cheated on me. The newspapers say that Germany has attacked Poland . . . Now, there’s everything you need for a true beginning—bad dreams, war, and a headache.”

Bad dreams, war and a headache—this, on what the narrator calls “the most important day in recorded human history”. He says, “Only a diary could bring together the personal and the historical like that. The world is no longer the same—Germany is attacking Poland, the war is starting, my head is aching, and that idiot Ch. has the cheek to cheat on me in my dreams. Today in dreams, tomorrow while awake. (Was that what Auden was thinking?) Let us recall that after discovering such infidelity, Shahryar begins his slaughter of women in One Thousand and One Nights. Did Auden even realize how many things those two lines register, how precise, how personally and cynically precise they are? Two lines about the most important day of the century.”

Alzheimer’s in pop culture

This is perhaps one of Time Shelter’s lesser achievements, but it does present a brief history of how humanity has reacted to dementia in general and Alzheimer’s disease in particular. Early in the novel, the narrator recalls a joke popular in America in the pre-World War II period. “The doctor diagnosed me with something, it was after his own name, but damned if I remember it!”

Over the last few decades, there have been a number of prominent representations of Alzheimer’s and dementia patients in cinema and literature, across all of pop culture, really. A pair of Pixar films is typically my go-to example in this context — Finding Nemo and Coco. In the former, the character of Dory (Ellen DeGeneres) shows classic short-term memory loss brought on by ageing, because of which Dory frequently repeats herself, forgets what she had said moments ago, and is generally confused for long stretches of time. In the latter, Mama Coco ie the protagonist’s great-grandmother, shows symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

In both these films, the target audience is children and so there isn’t a great deal of detail about these diseases. However, both Coco and Finding Nemo do treat these characters with a great deal of respect and dignity, for which they ought to be lauded.

In the mid-to-late 2000s, one of the most popular American TV shows on air was David E. Kelley’s legal dramedy Boston Legal. One of the two main characters in this show was William Shatner’s Denny Crane, a legendary trial lawyer who has never lost a case. However, his famed powers of argument are on the wane because of his dementia, which he insists on calling ‘mad cow disease’ (bovine spongiform encephalopathy). In the show’s concluding season, Crane is officially diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Boston Legal took a daring approach to representation—at every given opportunity, it used humour to depict the symptoms of dementia. Denny forgetting to put his pants on at court, Denny forgetting which year he’s in, Denny talking to his dead father in the middle of a boardroom meeting (that last one was in poor taste and didn’t really work for the narrative, in my opinion).

This was sometimes ill-advised—there’s only so much humour you can extract from a man’s rapid neural degeneration. But on occasion, Boston Legal was very, very funny and insightful about the question of memory loss. Around the same time Denny’s travails were prime time television, Bollywood came up with the Rani Mukerjee-Amitabh Bachchan film Black, where Amitabh’s character, a teacher named Debraj, develops Alzheimer’s disease, especially in the second half. In a especially moving scene, we see Michelle (Rani’s character, visually impaired) and Debraj together at a water fountain—earlier in the movie, we had seen Debraj teaching Michelle her first word in sign language; ‘water’. Now, the roles are reversed and Michelle teaches Debraj to sign ‘water’. It’s a neat, symmetric, immensely moving moment and even today’s it’s remembered as one of the pivotal scenes from the film.

What’s common to these representations is the idea that the past is a constant presence in our lives, and our constant underestimation of the power that it can wield. In Time Shelter, early on in the novel the narrator utters a profound line in the presence of Gaustine: “The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined.” A few pages later, he puts the following rhetoric query to the reader: “If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?”

Time Shelter brings us inside the minds and hearts of those who seek to recapture the past at any cost, and does so while providing a sensitive, empathetic portrayal of Alzheimer’s and dementia patients—no mean task, if you ask me.