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Time Shelter

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
"At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created," begins Time Shelter's enigmatic narrator, who goes unnamed. "In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ." But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a "vagrant in time" who has distanced his life from contemporary reality by reading old news, wearing tattered old clothes, and haunting the lost avenues of the twentieth century. In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first "clinic for the past," an institution that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. Serving as Gaustine's assistant, the narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to nostalgic scents and even wisps of afternoon light. But as the charade becomes more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic to escape from the dead-end of their daily lives―a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present. Through sharply satirical, labyrinth-like vignettes reminiscent of Italo Calvino and Franz Kafka, the narrator recounts in breathtaking prose just how he became entrenched in a plot to stop time itself.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 25, 2022
      A radical new therapy tests the power of nostalgia in the electric and fantastical latest from Gospodinov (The Physics of Sorrow). In present-day Vienna, geriatric psychiatrist Gaustine redecorates his clinic in the style of the 1960s, replete with miniature pink Cadillacs and Beatles memorabilia. Patients with memory issues appear invigorated by the decor and share more during therapy. The narrator, an unnamed amateur novelist who had the same idea as Gaustine years earlier, comes across an article about the psychiatrist and seeks him out. They strike up an unusual collaboration: Gaustine establishes clinics that painstakingly recreate bygone eras with artifacts tracked down by the novelist. The clinics rapidly expand and start offering services to healthy people, and eventually entire countries opt to simulate returns to supposedly happier eras (France, Germany, and Spain all choose the 1980s). The clever prose sells the zany premise and imbues it with poignant longing: “Everything happens years after it has happened.... Most likely 1939 did not exist in 1939, there were just mornings when you woke up with a headache, uncertain and afraid.” Thought-provoking and laced with potent satire, this deserves a spot next to Kafka.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Jeff Harding narrates an unusual contemplation on the nature of time and memory as a clinic lets Alzheimer's patients relive their memories by decorating each floor in the style of a different decade. An unnamed assistant is tasked with time-traveling to collect the minutiae for each floor, but when the clinic becomes too real, the general public begins visiting as entertainment. Harding embodies the narrator well but struggles with differentiating the various female characters. He is wonderful at evoking the twisting introspective writing. The story is often wry but is also intricate and bizarre. Harding works to keep the narration engaging in this quirky and reflective science-fiction tale. J.M.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

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  • English

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