Time Shelter is a sublime take on how we live, on how we have been living, and perhaps also about how we will live in the time to come. It is a book that most elegantly blends the past, the now, and the future, in its large-hearted vision of what it means to be human, of what we choose to live in a certain moment of time, and why we make the choices we do.
This book is everything I expected from it – nostalgia with a dash of contemporary, of what it means to live in the past, of dementia, of memory and the role it plays in our small lives – of what it means to be alive in a world that expects you to remember, when all you want to maybe do is forget. Of wanting to jump time and been given the opportunity to do that. Gaspodinov’s writing is sublime – it is. It is everything and everywhere indeed all at once. I cannot put my finger on it but I love it so much – just spectacularly written and translated beautifully by Angela Rodel.
For me the characters don’t matter, as much as what is going on – how years jump – decades whiz by, the joy of not wanting to keep track as a reader – of all the cultural references as years roll by – music, art, literature, movies, the works. Not to forget the role history will still play even if time is recreated and you are technically still in the present which is soon going to be the past. Absolutely spectacular! I hope it makes it to the shortlist.
Of Books and Reading 