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).
