I love the premise of Time Shelter: A therapist creates a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by recreating the past decade in which they feel most secure, and the idea of living in the past becomes increasingly popular for everyone. I appreciate how the plot makes literal the idea that we escape from the anxieties of the present through nostalgia for the past.
The first section of the book tells the stories of several patients to illustrate the importance of memory to our self-consciousness. For example, a man with dementia forms a strong bond with the secret policeman who monitored his activities in the Soviet era. Gospodinov emphasizes how scents and mundane details are most evocative of the past.
In the middle portion of the book, the countries of the European Union hold a referendum on which decade of the past they will return to. Various factions campaign for their favorite decades, using tactics that are familiar from political campaigning of all sorts. (The parties in any election are asking voters to decide based on their idealized version of the past.) In the end, nearly every country votes for the 1980s, not coincidentally the decade during which most voters were young.
I was disappointed that the final section didn't address the post-referendum world. The narrator briefly notes that people balk at giving up their smartphones and the complications of different countries being in different times, but the bulk of the conclusion deals with the narrator starting to lose his own memory.
Time Shelter has thought-provoking ideas about the links between the past and the present, but they felt like isolated insights that didn't develop over the course of the narrative.
No comments:
Post a Comment