"The years are the biggest Turk of them all, they’ve taken everything from me," says one of the old men the narrator encounters during a rally to support the Bulgarian uprising period as the time Bulgaria will revert to in its temporal revolution in "Time Shelter." In the present that the narrator depicts, nations have decided to turn back the clock: "Since a Europe of the future is no longer possible, let’s choose a Europe of the past."

When I first saw the cover of "Time Shelter" in a bookshop, I was instantly reminded of the wooden display boxes of Orhan Pamuk’s "Museum of Innocence," the actual museum based on the novel, which in turn chronicles the making of that museum. The colors, the objects and the wallpaper (always the wallpaper) on Georgi Gospodinov’s cover conjure up the 60s and the 70s, the period in which Pamuk’s novel is set, periods that get much love in "Time Shelter" as well.

From very early on in "Time Shelter," it is clear that the projects in the two novels are analogous: Pamuk’s narrator trying to preserve the memory of the time when he was in love by building a museum, and Gaustine, Gospodinov’s narrator’s double, creating rooms devoted to certain decades. With the visual aid of the cover and this premise, Pamuk continues to be the secret sharer in my reading of "Time Shelter." And not only Pamuk, but the authors, Pamuk himself names as his secret sharers. In his acknowledgments, Gospodinov does not name his but says he trusts the reader will discover them on their own.

Although I come to the book prepared for the narrative high jinks I am used to from Pamuk, Gospodinov and I don’t exactly hit it off at first. He tells us he is not sure whether the hero of the novel, Gaustine, the creator of the time shelters, is real or whether he has concocted him himself. Sentences like "When does the every day become history?" don’t help much either. But when the story gets going, and our narrator starts to describe Gaustine’s rooms designed to reflect a particular decade where patients with Alzheimer’s can relax for a while, the loving detail of the objects and the patients’ responses win me over.

Museums for past

When Gaustine opens one of his time shelters in Bulgaria, the objects start speaking or even singing to me, and indeed, resonances with Pamuk’s museum items become even greater. But what really unarms me is the story of Mr. S, an elderly Bulgarian gentleman who ends up in Gaustine’s Zurich establishment and who, before Alzheimer’s hits, tells the story of how he decided, or gathered enough courage to "defect" to the West one day looking at a light bulb. The narrator reveals that the light bulb is not merely a metaphor: when Mr. S was a child and he had won a prize, his father had, uncharacteristically, taken him up on his shoulders and Mr. S had come to eye level with the light bulb – binding the bulb and happiness into a bundle forever in his mind.

The novel is full of these touching moments from personal histories and most of the pasts that are remembered in the novel are Bulgarian ones. Although Türkiye was another type of East altogether through the 60s to the 90s, the yearning for the West and the objects through which it was expressed is painfully familiar. Printed catalogs for things you’ll never be able to buy, cars you learned about through bubble gum wrappers, and those one-legged tulip chairs (which I still have a great dislike for).

Gaustine’s time shelters, originally intended for the elderly, start attracting people of all ages and this feeds his mania for extending their reach. This reminds me of Halit Ayarcı of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s "Time Regulation Institute," with the same mania for setting up more and more time regulation centers both in Türkiye and abroad, keeping the clocks on time. In "Time Shelter," this mania is inverted, and the mania is about turning the clocks back, but again, through the intervention of the nation-state.

Countries are attracted by the idea of seeking refuge in a more or less modern past in the face of a very uncertain future. Why people can’t imagine a future is left to the imagination or the political bent of the reader – the suggestions in the novel are mostly political, interestingly without reference to environmental catastrophes that tell us that there really isn’t much left of the earth to consume.

Referendum for time

Different parties are set up in other European countries advocating turning the clock back to various decades, and people seem to congregate around the 70s and 80s because they are loathe to let go of their modern comforts. In Bulgaria, the two contending periods turn out to be a combined period of state socialism and the 1876 Bulgarian uprising against the Ottomans. It turns out it is a friend of the narrator who choreographs these rallies as we head to another very Pamuk moment, "The Black Book," to be precise. The narrator goes down to a basement to observe extras who mimic the motions of "homo Sovieticus," just as Pamuk’s narrator finds, in an underground vault, mannequins that have held on to their Ottoman facial expressions.

At one point, Gospodinov rephrases Tolstoy and says each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way. This doesn’t stop from the reader getting a feeling that Balkan countries are unhappy in similar ways, remembering wars – what sweet sadness to see the Balkan Wars mentioned as a turning point in history in a non-Turkish novel – that are footnotes in Western Europe. And when he talks about unhappiness as the only resource for some nations, is he not talking about Pamuk’s "hüzün"? Gospodinov even invokes "Ottoman Standard Time" as the time unit the Bulgarian Hero party uses for their rally. And then gives this account of Bulgarian identity:

"And weren’t they here precisely for that, to be with someone who was as confused as they are, yet proud, someone who hates Turks and Gypsies with the same passion that he loves tripe soup and imam bayıldı, the magnificence of the Bulgarian Khans, Turkish coffee, the anthem ‘Get Up, Get Up, Young Balkan Hero’ [...] someone who loves to doze a bit in the afternoon, to sit down in the evening with a little shot of rakia, to turn on the TV, to let fly a juicy curse or two."

But what makes Gospodinov my brother for life is this sentence: "As evening fell, the city smelled of roasted peppers, that favorite, most Bulgarian of scents." The unbreakable bond of the roasted pepper. He does say earlier that it is inconceivable how we have failed to invent a device for recording smells.

The account of the referenda, the expectation of riots and the narrator seeking refuge in a monastery, take the novel, this time, in a Houellebecqian direction. Violence does not erupt in this novel as in "Submission," but of course, some people do not agree with the outcome and set up their own temporal fiefdoms.

After sharing the results of the referenda, Gospodinov goes back to his Borges mode, saying things like "over the years it became ever more difficult to discern who was writing whom" and sharing sketches that look like the face of Fernando Pessoa.

But these narrative tricks do not detract from the real-time panorama of Europe he offers, with a mania for returning to a "safe" past. With such differing memories of the past, Gospodinov suggests that Europe already lives in different periods and that ensuring temporal unity may be more complex than ensuring a territorial one.