When it’s time for the clock change, my grandmother, Mamani, refuses to adjust her wall clock. She believes the old time works better and dislikes these changes. Whenever she has an appointment or a guest, she always asks: With the old time or the ridiculous new one? For her, the past was the golden era—when fruits were sweeter, people were kinder, the grass was greener, the sky was bluer, and life was simply better.
Reading Time Shelter reminded me of Mamani. I could picture her in her velvet green dress, her cheeks red with joy and health, wearing her gold earrings and necklace, waiting for my grandpa to take her to his parents’ house—the time of youth and glory!
Unlike her, I’ve always tried to forget the past and focus on the future. For me, the past belonged to the dead. But recently, I’ve been thinking more about it. And I keep remembering this quote from the book:
When you have no future, you vote for the past.
And isn’t that the moment we start living in the past instead of the present or the future? When we lose hope in what’s ahead, the only thing left to hold on to is what once was.
Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, the winner of the 2023 International The Booker Prizes , is a profound and deeply moving novel. With its unique and creative take on memory, nostalgia, and the unsettling passage of time, it offers a fresh perspective on familiar themes.
The story follows an enigmatic therapist, Gaustine, who creates a clinic for Alzheimer’s patients. Each floor is designed to resemble a different decade, offering patients a refuge in the past. But what begins as a compassionate experiment soon spirals into a wider societal phenomenon, as entire nations start retreating into past eras—blurring the line between memory and reality.
Imagine being able to live in any time period of your choosing. It sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? But the novel explores the dangers of such nostalgia.
This concept resonated deeply with me. I grew up in a country where people constantly live in the glory of the past. Unhappy with the present, and uncertain about the future, they cling to their golden age. Perhaps this is the curse of ancient civilizations—having a great past to hold on to while ignoring an uncertain and grey future. We filter out the bad memories and turn the past into an imagined utopia. And this is exactly what Gospodinov portrays so brilliantly: How does society manipulate history to escape an uncertain future?
The euphoria of the past becomes even stronger as we age and start losing the people we love. The book captures this feeling beautifully:
When people with whom you’ve shared a common past leave, they take half of it with them. Actually, they take the whole thing, since there’s no such thing as half a past... The person holding the other half is gone. The person who was so close during those days, mornings, afternoons, evenings, and nights, in the months and years... There is no one to confirm it, there is no one to play through it with.
He has no friends, no living relatives. No one to call. If we are not in someone else’s memory, do we even exist at all?
I thoroughly enjoyed Time Shelter. It’s the kind of book that makes you think, and what’s better than reading something exceptional that leaves you questioning and discovering? The novel is both melancholic and darkly humorous, capturing the human desire to escape uncertainty by seeking solace in the past. At its core, Time Shelter is not just about individual memory loss but also about how societies manipulate nostalgia—sometimes dangerously—to shape their future.
I loved the International Booker Prize winners of 2023 and 2024—Time Shelter and Kairos—and they have become my favourites. I can’t wait to see this year’s list!
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Shideh - loving your book reviews! Adding this to my BTR list. Thanks,
Mel
Interesting book, thanks for the review