Reenactment Machines: The Performance of Political Memory in Gospodinov’s Time Shelter

• In Event: Yugoslav Configurations II: Warped Time in the Balkans

Abstract

Gaustine, the elusive time flâneur in Bulgarian novelist Georgy Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (2020), engineers sanatoriums of the past where Alzheimer patients can enjoy their final years in the familiar settings of their youth or, alternately, the “unhappened” Western youth they never had. Gaustine seems to not only create these spaces but actually travel to various moments in history. His idea turns monstrous, spreading to the rest of Europe, where each country votes for the decade it perceives as its glorious past. Time is fragmented into different pasts, re-igniting nationalism. Meanwhile, in Bulgaria, two political factions are pulled between the warring reenactments of the personality cult of the Socialist years (Soc) and the nationalist moods of a failed liberation uprising (Bulgarian Heroes). Manipulation, performance, and the political spectacle of collective memory narratives are juxtaposed with the more personal process of forgetting. Entering the metafictional, the narrator’s own mind begins unraveling and merging with his infamous alter ego until a radical forgetting consumes him. But will it be possible to take comfort in a constructed, idealized past without falling into the trap of the most fatal mistakes of recent history? Gospodinov has created a time machine to warn us that sheltering in time from the issues of the day only leads to another all-too-familiar shelter: the bomb shelter.

Author

• Margarita Delcheva, Paperbag Journal