"At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly
the earth had been created," begins Time Shelter's enigmatic
narrator, who will go unnamed. "In the mid-seventeenth century, the
Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a
starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ." But for our
narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a
"vagrant in time" who has distanced his life from contemporary
reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and
haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century. In an
apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted
forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first "clinic for the
past," an institution that offers an inspired treatment for
Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in
minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in
time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. Serving as
Gaustine's assistant, the narrator is tasked with collecting the
flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s
shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even wisps of afternoon
light. But as the charade becomes more convincing, an increasing
number of healthy people seek out the clinic to escape from the
dead-end of their daily lives-a development that results in an
unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.
Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of
Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in
breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop
time itself. "A trickster at heart, and often very funny" (Garth
Greenwell, The New Yorker), prolific Bulgarian author Georgi
Gospodinov masterfully stalks the tragedies of the last century,
including our own, in what becomes a haunting and eerily prescient
novel teeming with ideas. Exquisitely translated by Angela Rodel,
Time Shelter is a truly unforgettable classic from "one of Europe's
most fascinating and irreplaceable novelists" (Dave Eggers).
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