Time Shelter : Georgi Gospodinov

 

How can we be already so sure that all things are created at once? What if time was in its teenage years and the world was born then. What if time and space are not parallel like body and mind some think of.

Starting reading Time Shelter immediately after finishing Hitchcock's spellbound has really drained me into the deep pod of psychoanalysis. Do the psychiatrists really take shelter into patients’ life as Constance took into Ballantyne’s life? Like Gustine is taking in the novel. (2)

 

It's a series of surprises as I came to know Dr. Alzheimer, as of Ballantyne, the imposter of Dr. Edwardes was suffering from amnesia. Will the film be at the crossroads of the themes of memory and time with the novel at last? Let's see what comes next. 

 

"When does every day become history?" (6)

 

As Ishmael, I also believe when I know my today, I know my history. Similarly, when I know Auden's history on 1st September 1939, I know his today. I think my posts on my personal blog, Facebook or Twitter are like my diary. Some are public and some are private. Should I write them in less critical ways? I think I should.

 

"The past is not just that which happened to you. Sometimes it is that which you just imagined." (12)

 

It's a new kind of thinking about the idea of the past. It's true. We have many memories that we believe as true that are merely of our imagination or the made-up narrative told by others. I have such a memory that I recall as truly happened but I inquired later and found that they are just stories from my childhood.

 

"If we are not in someone else's memory, do we even exist at all?" (16)

 

I laughed, laughed and laughed with ecstasy as soon as I read the line and the philosophical weight behind its linguistic layers.

 

When I watched Godard’s Contempt [1964], the rift of marriage between Paul and Camille had been showcased as a perfect adaptation with the love and marriage of Odyssey and Penelope. Surprisingly, Gospodinov in the Time Shelter [2023] has made a unique explication of the theme of passing and the human longings to go back to the time gone with Homer’s Odyssey.

 

“If you don’t have a name, you’re dropped from history.”

 

In my senior year at the university when I was doing the course titled The Philosophy of Language and Analytical Philosophy, one thing hit on my mind that language is the ultimate tool for understanding reality. If we have no structured language, we could not possibly make the external world comprehensible as we like to do. And naming is the basis of epistemological progress.

 

“… Zachary Stoyanoff’s 1884 Pages from the Autobiography of a Bulgarian Insurgent,”

I was a bit amazed to get this reference “1884 pages” as I am also doing a close and inclusive research on Mesopotamian campaign covering Ottoman and Balkans. WWI is also the history of insurgency, mutiny, rebellion and revolution along the great war that tore apart the geographies, empires, cultures and the idea of violence in human history, that make great transitions of modern period.

 

"..according to the Celts, one of the first signs of the apocalypse is the mixing of the seasons."

 

The world is going through this. Ecological catastrophe. Few days ago, the Bengal delta experienced a big super cyclone because of the climatic mixes.

 

After reading Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, a single feeling has been reverberating in my ears that memory is everything that makes sense and the existence of the external world that shapes our arc of knowledge. It’s a new kind of novel that attempts to roam the whole world and its history. Though it is Eurocentric, we can have the pulse of the modern world. I think readers can be the same after closing the last page of Time Shelter.

 

Angela Rodel is marvelous with her translation works and I have to struggle to believe that Time Shelter is a work of translation.

 

Time Shelter [2023]

Времеубежище [2020]

Georgi Gospodinov

Bulgarian, Bulgaria.