The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 1 November 2023
by Georgi Gaspodinov
In recent years, scientists and doctors have contrived an approach to dementia and Alzheimer's disease that embraces the world of the patient, accessing the view of reality that remains to sufferers of these degenertive illnesses, and those remaining memories to find a place in which they can live in their minds, even to thrive. As of this writing, it is unclear how many or where such experiments have actually been implemented, though there have been some stories. Indeed, it is a seductive idea. Place a dementia patient into the time in which they feel most alive and alert, and they can live their best life in the time remaining. But some of that seductiveness is also the idea that any of us might consider choosing to live in a specific time in our own past in which we felt most alive, happiest, and at our best. Why not? (Because it is more problematic than that. Time is not kind. And the idea is basically nuts.)
Bulgarian author Georgi Gaspodinov takes this story as a starting point and weaves a sprawling and surrealistic satire of our wish to live in the world as it seemed perfect to us. Time plays tricks on the author and narrator of this story, of course, and upon the reader, as we question the identity of its primary characters. Our narrator, basically Gaspodinov himself, meets an enigmatic scientist who he calls Gustine. This Gustine is interested in the complexities of time and how it is perceived. And he seems to live a nonlinear existence, as if he is reaching to our narrator through time itself. Gustine begins by setting up a resort for the elderly sufferers of dementia. Each floor of one large building houses a different decade in the past. Our narrator visits these and remarks on the highly detailed recreations of those decades, down to the cigarettes people smoke and the recreation of the newspapers they read. It is very convincing, but there feels like something is missing. We are still not of the time within the time in which we created it. Still, the experiment is wildly successful. People who visit with their relatives in the asylum are drawn into the calm certainty of living within the past. Before long, such resorts are popping up all over Europe, catering to the ostensibly healthy. Entire towns decide to live in certain decades. And, soon enough, entire nations are holding referenda on the notion of selecting a decade to which the entire populace will move.
What ensues is Gaspodinov's satire on Brexit and the provincial prejudices of various European countries, most particularly his own Bulgaria. Historical context becomes crucial. How many people would choose to live in the years of war and Holocaust? How many choose to live in times of oppression or economic waste? More than you might think. The arguments for one and another time become tied up with national identity and a modern proclivity for conspiracy and suspicion. The story begins to look like something devised by Italo Calvino, or, more recently, China Miéville; a multilayered meditation on time and identity, and the creation of one's own environment. There is a sense that time, fragmented as it is, is ending. And yet, surely, there are some places in the world that choose to remain temporally neutral, in the present day. But with so many countries frozen in the past, how can the world move forward. Does it matter? On the other hand, indeed, some countries have had the experience of freezing themselves out from the rest of the world. On this Gaspodinov is reflecting on Cold War Eastern Europe, his native land, and the injustice of being forced to live in a backward and deprived age. Ideology drives all the worst in humanity. Nothing new there, under the Sun.