Ironically, this review is somewhat untimely. Time Shelter was published in 2022. It won the International Booker Prize in 2023. I’ve had a copy on my shelf for over a year, meaning to pick it up, but somehow never getting around to it.

I’m not sure how it is for you other bibliophiles out there, but I’m ever finding connections between the book I’m reading and others on my to-be-read pile. These connections can propel a title to the top of the list.

I recently reviewed Down in the Sea of Angels, a book about history, about our pasts, and how they inform the present. Time Shelter seemed like a logical partner and so, here I am.

“Happy Countries are all alike; each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way…”

This is a book that examines our association with the past. It probes the power of nostalgia and the yearning for “simpler times.”

It opens with an experiment to aid the distress of Alzheimer’s patients, by creating a space where they can immerse themselves in a specific decade, right down to tiny details like newspapers arriving each day, dated sequentially but in the past. Decor, fashion, TV programs, and music of the given period are recreated too.

The experiment draws the attention of people beyond the care home it started in, and before we know it, whole countries are hankering to live in a bygone era. 

“Warning, history in the rearview mirror is always closer than it appears”

This is not the easiest book to read. It has a European literary heavyweight heft. It reminded me a little of Georges Perec’s Life: A Users Manual, a book I enjoyed but also often left me lost. I must confess there were times when I was reading the words of Time Shelter in sequence but not necessairly construing the meaning of them.

Time Shelter is a meandering and, at times, surreal novel. The person responsible for creating the Time Shelter’s is “Gaustine,” a man quoted in the novel’s pull quotes, but also somebody, who doesn’t exist, and is, in all probability, the author himself.

Yet, the book is well worth the effort of perservering with. Perhaps because I live with daily reminders of the UK’s disaterous exit from the European Union, I loved the chapters in the last third of the book, that detailed how entire countries vote to turn back the clock. Gospodinov details the cultural reasons why each country in Europe voted for a particular era. It was both funny an insightful. It makes you examine your relationship with history and question the allure of nostalgia.

On both sides of the Atlantic, governments and agitators appear to want to return to some glowing golden age, distilling only the best bits, forgetting the bits that were not so good. They leave out the fact that, for many, things were far worse in those days. Gospodinov neatly skewers the appropration of history for political gain.

Time Shelter is the sort of book that you have to work at. It’s a book that you finish thinking you have learned an awful lot, but probably missed at least half as much again. It’s the sort of book that when completed, you want to turn it over and start again. Taking what you’ve learned into a second reading and see what else you can gain from this complex multi-facted story. Even writing this review has made me want to pick it up again and see what else I can uncover.

The book is funny, but it also a warning. A parable about the perils of looking backwards, of believing that the past is brighter than the future. A Gaustine quote from the book says,

“Man is only the only working time machine we have now.”

But we can only move in one direction. Whether it’s recreating Smoot-Hawley or something darker, the past does not offer us refuge from the present. Hankering after it can only lead to further disillusion.

This is a powerful read that despite being about recreating the past has its finger on the pulse of current political discourse. Time Shelter won the International Man Booker prize, so it hardly needs my endorsement, but nevertheless, I rank it as one of the most eye opening novels I’ve ever read.

If you would like to pick up a copy of Time Shelter, you can do so here in the US and here, in the UK. (Affiliate Links)

If you enjoyed this review, check out my other book reviews, here. 

I received a copy of this book in order to write this review.

Source: geekdad.com