Time Shelter
Georgi Gospodinov · 2023
A clinic for Alzheimer's patients recreates past decades room by room. As patients retreat into the past, the entire European continent follows, and the novel becomes a meditation on nostalgia and Europe's self-destructive political longing for a past that never quite existed.
The case against
Once the clinic conceit goes continental, the novel stops being one: the back half dissolves into essayistic fragments about Europe's referendums on the past, brilliant by the paragraph and shapeless by the chapter. Gaustine is a device, the narrator is a voice, and nobody in the book has enough body to anchor the ideas.
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