Time Shelter just won the International Booker Prize, given to the best novel that has been translated into English. It didn't deserve it. The people who gave it the award seem to have believed that it strikes a blow against reactionary populism, which it absolutely does not. In fact it might be the strongest argument in favor of reactionary populism I have ever read. Otherwise the novel is okay, sometimes interesting and sometimes not.
Georgi Gospudonov is a veteran novelist and poet from Bulgaria. As with the Romanian novel I recently reviewed, it struck me that having grown up in the Eastern Bloc is an advantage for a contemporary writer. If things get slow you can always just toss in a few outlandish memories from your youth, all those things about communism that satirize themselves: the chanting of absurd slogans, the bitter jokes, the mandatory school visits to see the preserved body of the founding dictator, the way secret police files fill up with pointless trivia from the lives of those under suspicion.
To me the most interesting part of Time Shelter was the relationship between the narrator and a man named Gaustine. Sometimes Gaustine appears as a fully functioning person with a peculiar habit of wandering around in time, but other times the narrator admits that he invented Gaustine and has full control over what he does. When he thinks up a shocking aphorism, he attributes it to one of Gaustine's publications, or to his notebooks. Some of the aphorisms are indeed quite striking, and Gaustine has a weird outsider perspective on Europe and its history. This made me ponder where our ideas come from and whether the range of our thought is limited by our fear of saying outrageous things that might somehow be held against us. Would having a secret mouthpiece who would never be associated with us do anything to unlock our minds? In the relationship between the author and his alger ego was the seed of an actually interesting book, which sadly never gets the chance to grow.
The plot of Time Shelter, such as it is, concerns attempts to recreate the past. This takes off from a scheme by Gaustine, appearing in the guise of a geriatric psychiatrist, to create clinics in which people with Alzheimer's are treated by surrounding them with the world of their youth. And for many, this seems to work, soothing them and making their last months or weeks more pleasant. At first Gaustine sets up single rooms decorated to a particular decade, then wings, then whole small villages where everything looks like 1955 or 1967.
And then, in a way that goes completely unexplained, this mania for recreating the past escapes the clinics and spreads across Europe. You see crowds of people on the street, dressed in the clothes of past epochs, listening to old music; political parties are formed with the aim of bringing back particular decades. Eventually a convulsed Europe stages a great referendum, each nation voting on which decade it wants to go back to.
The longest and most detailed section of the book describes the narrator's return to Bulgaria on the eve of the referendum. In Bulgaria the vote will be a choice between two eras, each backed by an organized political party. On one side are the nostalgists for communism who want to go back to the 1960s, when the state took care of everyone and people believed in the future. On the other are Bulgarian nationalists who want to return to the years around 1900 and recreate the national wars of independence against the Ottomans. They grow huge mustaches, wear embroidered vests, carry scimitars and pistols. The narrator attends the rallies held in Sophia by both parties on the day before the vote, observing the passion and absurdity of it all.
And indeed it is all absurd. Both nationalism and communism have been tried as solutions to the problems of human life and found wanting, and their trappings are simply ludicrous to anyone who has not surrendered to their ideological mind control.
But as a criticism of that kind of politics, Time Shelter falls on its face in the mud. Because you have to ask yourself: what, exactly, is the narrator, as he observes all of this? Where does he stand, and what does he believe in?
He is nowhere. He believes nothing. He is nothing.
He is divorced, childless, with no close friends other than the one he invented, living abroad (rather than in any particular foreign place), earning his living as a consultant to dubious psychiatric clinics. He never gives voice to a single sentiment about politics or society beyond a visceral reaction against nostaligia. Ok, fine, as a political practice, nostaligia is stupid. But what is the alternative? In the Europe of Time Shelter, the alternative is nothingness. To be nobody, to believe nothing, to wander around from place to place and decade to decade in search of fleeting pleasures. In one of the few moving scenes, the narrator muses on returning to the Italy of the 1950s, exploring an Italian town, emerging from a narrow street into a small square where his friends are gathered around an outdoor table, drinking and laughing. Asked where paradise is, he points to his friends.
That is an important kind of happiness, and one can imagine a novel in which this is effectively juxtaposed to absurd ideological programs. But by bringing elections and politics into the novel, Gospudonov forces us to ask other sorts of questions. Like, what is the alternative to reactionary politics? Because you have to have an alternative. You can't simply say, that's bad. What is good? If our narrator actually has any faith in future life under the EU, with a mixed economy and contentious politics, he never says so.
Is our rootless cosmopolitan narrator any happier than the people marching under reactionary banners? So far as I can tell, he is less happy, and he is certainly more alone. In fact he spends the last section of the book hiding out in a monastery, cut off from everything. He is a walking advertisement for throwing yourself into some kind of absurd political movement, so you would belong to something and have some people to call your own. So you would have something, anything, to believe in.
No comments:
Post a Comment