Pete's Log: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov
Entry #2460, (Books, Writing, n such)(posted when I was 45 years old.)
I grew up about 80 miles from the "Iron Curtain" and in many ways, "Curtain" is an apt metaphor, since we were always looking to the West and rarely peaked beyond that curtain to the East.
So while I could pick out Bulgaria on a map, there's not much else I could have told you about it. On some recent bookstore visit, I picked up a Bulgarian novel, Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, and I'm glad I did, even though it wasn't the easiest read.
It was published in 2020 and written before the pandemic (strange that this fact seems important context, but the pandemic did weird things to time). The English translation by Angela Rodel was published in 2022 and won the International Booker Prize. I learned that that prize is split evenly between the author and the translator, which I find quite interesting. There were many sentences through the book that I wanted to note down, and that in part is the translator's doing.
I remember, of course, several particularly important silences, but I have no way of retelling those.
I love that sentence.
Time Shelter is a book about memory, both individual and collective. The book is meandering; does not, for the most part, put quotes around dialog; doesn't name most of its characters. The plot feels secondary to the ideas that it explores.
Before yet another aside, the narrator states "I will exercise my right to marginalia" and it feels like only a meandering review full of marginalia of its own could do it justice. It is a literary book, full of references to Auden, Melville, Donne, Dostoevsky.
A day (and perhaps 50 pages) into reading Time Shelter, I chanced upon The Closing of the Bulgarian Frontier, an essay published earlier this year. It too is full of literary references and also explores time. How strange a coincidence to find such an essay by a Bulgarian as I read my first Bulgarian novel. If you'd like to know if Time Shelter is for you, I'd recommend checking out that essay and if you like it, then proceed to Time Shelter.
I personally have a complicated relationship with literary fiction. It often makes me feel like an outsider. But when I do understand a reference, I get rewarded with a dopamine hit, just like when playing trivia or doing a crossword and I know an answer outside my wheelhouse.
Several lifetimes ago I enjoyed Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and upon learning how filled it was with literary references, I took upon myself the task of learning those references. This endeavor ultimately failed—I never made it through the Borges I bought. Appropriately enough, Borges gets several mentions in Time Shelter as well.
Eco hides his literary references, though. I wouldn't have known they were there if I hadn't read about them outside the context of The Name of the Rose. A wink to insiders while still producing a compelling story that outsiders can enjoy. Gospodinov sort of beats you over the head with literary references. But perhaps this invites the outsiders in to explore that world.
On more than one occasion I had to think of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok" where their universal translators can translate the literal meaning of what Tamarians are saying, but because the Tamarians speak only in allegory, the crew of the Enterprise can't understand them. "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" indeed. Oh to be an insider of this type of language.
And then you get quotes like "Happened stories are all alike, every unhappened story is unhappened in its own way." I know that's a reference to Dostoevsky without even having read Anna Karenina. The dopamine hit wasn't diminished for having been unearned.
In the end, I can't help myself. Both Time Shelter and "The Closing of the Bulgarian Frontier" make multiple references to The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. So I found a complete edition in German. Hopefully it fares better than Borges.
