Time Shelter // Nostalgia in Society's Decline
I took a chance on an audiobook this year. It’s been a year without much slack, and leisure reading has been hard to come by, so I’ve been listening to more audiobooks while I work around the house. This one was a recommendation from Hoopla , and I gave it a try: Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov. From the description, I thought it would be a funky story about time travel. Instead, it was a tragic and often funny story about how Alzheimer’s disease affects individuals and societies, and I think it has something to say about this week’s kerfuffle over the US Senate’s dress code. Time Shelter Time Shelter is a Bulgarian novel, published in 2020 in Bulgarian then translated into English in 2022. The narrator’s relationship with a mysterious friend, Gaustine, is the core around which the story develops. Gaustine pulls the narrator into a business venture: he is developing a clinic for patients with Alzheimer’s disease. He wants to provide them with the greatest possible comfort in thei