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Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov

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nelsonsnook's review against another edition

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challenging inspiring mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

seanm's review against another edition

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dark reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

mel_st's review against another edition

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3.0

This book explored an interesting idea and, in the end, offered up an extreme version of the populist agendas that seek to turn the clock back to some perceived past that was better. While I enjoyed it, I felt like exploring the theme got in the way of fully realised characters and plot.

kaarebeepz's review against another edition

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adventurous funny informative lighthearted mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

hi_immatt's review against another edition

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challenging emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.75

Some interesting points are made about our relationship in our present with our past and what the ramifications of a full-throttled embrace of the latter would be, but I was expecting these things to manifest more in character or plot than the actually did. Far more philosophical in its musings, I simply was caught off guard by the realities of what was on the page.

cheesy_hobbit's review against another edition

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4.0

Reading this book felt like I was acquiring a taste for radishes, but in 300 pages instead of 30 years.

It begins as a fairly organized and straightforward first-person narrative about our narrator’s project building “time shelters” to counter memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s and dementia.

But it suddenly departs for a jumpy and philosophical exploration into time, specifically the past and past memory, on an individual and global scale, mixed in with the narrator himself slowly unraveling to his own memory disorder.

Gospodinov’s prose is more poetic than narrative, and once I accepted the book as a meditative and mental exercise rather than a progressing story, I began to appreciate the microscopic insights that Gospodinov makes into how humanity and human identity is built around individual and shared temporal memories and experiences.

I’m struggling to find any words that communicate the experience of reading this book. It is most certainly not a palette cleanser, but it isn’t a dreary malaise either. It exists in this metaphysical plane of philosophical inquiry threaded around a quest for understanding within the story as it is presented but also within the narrator (and by extension the author, as the line between the two seems blurry at best).

I’m not sure who I would recommend this book to. Slightly academic, but not snobby, with a lot of time spent alluding to various revolutions and socio-political movements and disasters of the 20th century across Europe, viewed through a lens of hardened post-Soviet Eastern European malaise.