History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again. - Maya Angelou

 

History need not be lived again, and yet the world ends up reliving history in every decade, every era. History is here to teach us what general education fails, learn from history and don’t let it happen again. But humans lack the power of taking learnings from the mistakes of their ancestors and hence the saying, history repeats itself.

 

But Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter tries to hold on to history for an innovative medical treatment for the aged population. Creativity runs wild in this novel, where the protagonists take shelter in the discomfort of time gone by as a method of healing. In doing so the author navigates through some very important historical events that have had an impact so great in the minds of an entire generation, that their lives and memories became almost inseparable from those little pieces of history.

 

I feel, it maybe one of the most complicated books that I have read in the recent past. The book felt like a collage of events, of great historical importance, mostly from the European continent, but rest of the world gets a little space too, now and then. Bulgaria remains the focal point of the story, and the other historical events of Europe were often interwoven with each other, impacting the core in some or other way. There is an interesting blend of wit, humour and sorrow in the book.

 

Some may call the book cynical, or too much focussed on the unpopular events. But from unpopularity of the past is born a much calmer present and so on. The idea here is to treat Alzheimer’s in the older population by giving them the familiarity of the era which had the highest impact on their lives. And while doing so, the author unveils stories after stories, some known, some unknown. Not a simple or easy read, but surely fascinating.

 

How the lives are shaped and transformed by the changing political situations, cannot be ignored. The thought that the past can heal a person is contradicted by a second thought of how some pieces of the past may better remain forgotten. For example, when a woman is scared to get close to the shower, we get a subtle hint that she might be a Holocaust survivor. Hence, sometimes the right kind of forgetting is also therapeutically necessary.

 

This imaginary clinic of a mysterious therapist, Gaustine, becomes so successful that even people with no ailments soon start gravitating towards it. Everyone wanted a piece of the past.

 

The end is my favourite.

 

UNBELONGERS SYNDROME

 

“No time belongs to you, no place is your own. What you are looking for is not looking for you, that which you are dreaming about is not dreaming about you. You know that something was yours in a different place and in a different time, that’s why you’re always crisscrossing past rooms and days. But if you are in the right place, the time is different. And if you are in the right time, the place is different.

 

Incurable.”

 

 

“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” - Winston Churchill.