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Two reviews of Asylum in Spain: how an uncertain present and potentially devastating future make many nostalgic for a fictional past
“Diary” republished from “Portal Culture” two reviews of the novel “Time Asylum” by Georgi Gospodinov, published in the Spanish media “El Mundo” and “El Pais”. The translation from Spanish is by Maria Vutova. The title is “Diary”.
El Mundo/ La Lectura
Rewriting the past – when memory is a weapon
Humor and tenderness shine in the sharp scalpel of Georgi Gospodinov, who captures in “Time Asylum” the spirit of an era that yearns more than anything for a return to happy times…
Unlike the future, which is open to the unpredictable, the past is like the clay we model on the potter’s wheel as we turn the pedal of nostalgia, and it fits in our hands to “what we only imagined”. In this way, the past mixes what actually happened with the unheard prayers, what we think (or are told) happened, and an improved version of it based on the outdated longings of youth.
“What could have been and what is
point to the same end – the present,”
as the poet said.
Thus, when we are burdened by the present and fearful of the future, memory creates its own refuge in time. What if it were possible to embrace that past happiness, so dreamy and intoxicating, in spaces set aside for that purpose in a kind of clinics for the past?
This is the premise of the new, third in a row, novel by Georgi Gospodinov (1968), magnificently translated into Spanish, and hence the title – a neologism in Bulgarian (time refuge), which in its Spanish version has become the no less impressive Las tempestálidas, with classical and mythological overtones, perhaps a nod to the minotaur from The Physics of Sadness, his second novel.
The novel “Time Asylum” was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award
European writers, whose countries have known the yoke of empires and utopias, as well as the traumatic consequences of their disintegration in conditions of accelerated transitions, have a lot to tell us about the monsters of memory and their use as a tool to manipulate public discontent. In the face of an uncertain future, a conveniently idealized copy of the past is created, to which it is proposed to return – something objectively impossible. The literary production of the eastern and south-eastern European periphery, which after the fall of the Wall was required to produce local and exotic novels to confirm the stereotypes attributed to it by the West – and which persist – now offers us the best interpretations of our modernity.
A cure for forgetfulness
And in this constellation (together with Tokarchuk, Kurkov, Kartarescu or Krasnahorkai) shines Gospodinov: poet, playwright and collector of cultural stories from life during communism, as well as fiction writer. And it shines with its own radiance, perhaps, as he himself said, due to the Bulgarian identity, which suffered defeats twice in the last century and whose decades during socialism are distinguished by the fact that they are not distinguished by anything, which is an inexhaustible source of sadness. That’s why his prose is imbued with that untranslatable sense of sadness, the anguish of losing what you never had but still miss.
With his insight and warm humor (remember the story of the narrator in “Physics of Sadness” and his girlfriend who buy a cookbook to bake a cake, even though they don’t have any of the ingredients) only Gospodinov could come up with an alter an ego that, together with Gaustin (often present in his works), created a clinic for patients with memory loss in Zurich, a city in the shadow of two masterpieces about time – “The Magic Mountain” and The Theory of Relativity.
Alzheimer’s patients can choose from one of the clinic’s floors, decorated in the style of a bygone decade, whatever makes them feel better. Each patient carries with him a part of the European (lack of) memory, which Gospodinov explores sometimes with dark humor, sometimes with deep tenderness, as is the case with Mrs. Sh., who “fell into silent hysteria at the mere sight of a soul”, for to reveal later that she survived Auschwitz (“what she had wanted to erase all her life came back like an oncoming train and could not be saved in other memories and another time”).
A future that has already happened
This invention is far from being exhausted by the application of an apparently beneficial therapy in this clinic, a kind of interweaving of “Farewell, Lenin!” and “Grand Hotel “Budapest”, but everything gets out of control when branches begin to be opened in other cities as well, including in Bulgaria, and not only sick people but also healthy people resort to them, seeking refuge in nostalgia from present and future storms.
The idea finds good ground: “and then the past began to conquer the world”. National referendums are being held to choose those “happy times” to return to. The author uses this framework to devote one part to the Bulgarian case – more precisely to the clash between post-communists and neo-nationalists, and another – to the rest of the European countries, taking advantage in a comical way of all the clichés: Germany chooses 1989, Spain – la Movida from the 1980s, etc.
Would this be the best possible world, one in which each nation experiences its own “golden age”? Asylum is a novel that synthesizes the current zeitgeist—which will continue to vibrate with other tones well into the future—and is a remarkable literary creation about our most elusive longing: to stand the test of time without dying in the attempt. . For this, Gospodinov reminds us, there will always be literature.
The power of stories
“Our stories and our books have the function of time capsules. I think that only the transient, limited in time, that which is alive and will die, should be preserved,” says the author. “This is also the role of stories, they are the ones that ultimately give us the illusion that we exist, that the things that happen to us have their own meaning, their own meaning and their own order. Without our stories, we are just chaotically moving elementary particles.”
March Rebon, 27 02 2023
* * *
Year Pais/Babelia
“Time Asylum” – the dictatorship of the past according to Gospodinov
The Bulgarian writer describes a world mired in an uncertain present and facing a potentially devastating future, tempted to repeat the mistakes of past times.
“I only want to make a novel from the beginning. A novel that keeps going, promises something, gets to page 17 and starts again,” declares the narrator of Natural Novel; naturally, this novel has already been written, and not once (Museo de la Novela de la Eterna /Museum of the Eternal Novel), but few have written it more than once; this is exactly what the Bulgarian writer does in “Natural Novel”, “Physics of Sadness” and now in “Time Asylum” – a novel about how an uncertain present and possibly devastating future give rise to many people’s nostalgia for a fictional past without a beginning.
“Time Asylum” tells about the friendship between the narrator and the psychiatrist Gaustin, a Bulgarian who opens in Zurich – and later in other cities around Europe, including behind the former (and future) Iron Curtain – clinics for the past, which, like “asylums” , alleviate the symptoms of Alzheimer’s and senile dementia in patients: comfortably seated in recreations of their favorite decade, some of them go peacefully, while others show visible improvement.
“There is nothing accidental today about this wave of people losing their memory. These people are here to tell us something,” admits Gaustin. Their successful treatment makes their relatives want to expand the clinics: why not try what is so good for the old?, and so the clinics grow into settlements. From there to turning them into entire countries that, as patients of history, wish to go back to their past, there is only one step for an intellect like that of Gospodinov.
Europe is again divided, but no longer only into territories, but also into eras, “as if God is rewinding the tape”: France chooses its serene decade of the 80s, Spain prefers the destape years after the death of Franco and the fall of censorship, Portugal stays in 1974, Sweden chooses 1977 (the Poang armchair from Ikea along with ABBA, the disco).
“Some, most I guess, did it out of nostalgia for their happy years, others – out of fear that the world has irresistibly gone downhill and the future has been canceled. A special anxiety hovered around,” the narrator says. Before long, separate groups, unhappy with the past that had fallen to them, began to carry out assassinations; but not so much internal division as the exhilaration of re-creating the past turns out to be decisive in the way history is rewound in the countries of Eastern and the rest of Europe: one day in Sarajevo the archduke is killed again, while a million and a half German extras, disguised as Wehrmacht soldiers, waiting at the Polish border.
“How is the novel possible today when the tragic is denied us,” asks the narrator in “A Natural Novel.” Asylum’s answer to this question is that it emphasizes the social nature of all personal experience, giving it the dimension of myth, as well as its circular nature. It also consists in returning again and again to the beginning (in Gospodinov’s case, childhood under communism and the youthful years with seemingly unlimited possibilities after the end of the Soviet Union) in one of those “fantasies of repetition”, which Peter Handke spoke of as far back as 1983 and which, as in the case of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, have multiplied in recent years as the future becomes increasingly unthinkable.
“Asylum of Time” does not manage to escape completely from well-known themes and images that have become commonplace for Central European literature (the flâneur, the Magic Mountain, the disease, the war), but it surpasses them thanks to its sense of humor, the enormous sensuality of the memory through the pen of the author and the perfection of the stories that make up this fragmented and wild novel that is absolutely outstanding.
Gospodinov, who has already been translated into more than 23 languages and is the winner of most of the major European awards, belongs to the lineage of Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, as well as to that of Mircea Cartarescu, mbut, in my opinion, he is more effective than the Romanian writer, has a better ear, and is not so condescending to the reader, but unlike them all he is not limited in form; he again and again weaves and untangles the rope with which history wraps itself around our necks, in order to free us from it and in the meantime observe the threads of which it is composed: childhood memories, encyclopedias, wars, families, forgetful old men who still trying to jump the Wall, old men traumatized by a war not yet over for them, pots of metal melted by guns and tanks, Beatles fans who remember that in a year John Lennon will be killed and try to prevent, mirrors in which the characters and their creators are reflected with the same face, corridors, books, folk costumes, demonstrations, cops, memory, secrets, fears.
“The more a society forgets, the more someone produces, sells and fills the vacated niches with ersatz memory,” writes Gospodinov. And that’s what we should be most concerned about right now, he hints. “After the dictatorship of the future comes the dictatorship of the past”.
Patricio Pron, 02/04/2023
