Prizewinners
Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov (Liveright Publishing Corp., 2022). Translated by Angela Rodel.
This year’s International Booker Prize winner, Time Shelter, recalls the work of W.G. Sebald, who often wrote from the point of view of a traveler receiving the stories of enigmatic and suffering post-war characters. Sebald’s great novel Austerlitz was reportedly inspired by a picture postcard of a proud-looking young boy in a white satin page costume that Sebald found in a secondhand shop. In Sebald’s novel, the young Austerlitz escapes Czechoslovakia on the Kindertransport just ahead of Hitler’s invasion. As an adult, Austerlitz wanders through Europe seeking information about his lost parents. “[I had been] keeping myself apart from so-called current events in the hope, as I now think, said Austerlitz, that time will not pass away, has not passed away, that I can turn back and go behind it, and there I shall find everything as it once was….”
Similarly, in Time Shelter, an enigmatic psychiatrist named Gaustine evokes a past world for his suffering clients using artifacts that he gleans from the secondhand shops. The “time shelter” of the book’s title refers to a Swiss sanitorium intended to comfort a growing number of people who are losing their memories—perhaps including the narrator, who is known mainly by his (and the author’s) initials, G.G. Gaustine’s clinic is a hospice facility in an age of dementia—or perhaps a return to the cocoon of an imagined past for a people who have determined that Europe has no future.
The Zurich apartment Gaustine uses as his clinic has been decorated in the style of the nineteen-sixties, and here, G.G. encounters a red Olivetti typewriter. “Immediately I wanted—my fingers wanted—to pound something out, to feel the resistance of the keys, to hear the bell ding at the end of a line….” He remembers hitting random keys as a child: “A possible code, which we will never crack.” G.G. determines that his highest calling shall be to scour the world for similar nostalgic items, and the two team up to expand the clinic. Soon, the whole building is full of suites dedicated to various time periods.
And yet something is wrong with Gaustine. Having announced at the beginning of the novel that “[on] September 1, 1939, early in the morning, came the end of human time,” Gaustine takes off for central Europe; it appears from his letters that he has gone back to the late nineteen-thirties, where the second World War is looming. G.G. is left to run the clinic while Gaustine becomes “a vagrant in time, if you will.” As the time-shelter contagion spreads, all of Europe holds a grand referendum in which each country chooses to return to a particular decade of the twentieth century. Soon, a long spine of the 1980s stretches from France into Germany; it’s the 1970s in Scandinavia and Portugal; and a streak of the 90s runs through the former Eastern bloc countries. The narrator’s home country of Bulgaria leaves the EU, and the old socialist dictatorship soon descends. G.G., who is visiting Sofia, has seen this story before, and he gets out two days before the border closes: “It’s nice to know your home country so well that you can leave it shortly before the trap springs.” But in characteristically neutral fashion, Switzerland chooses to return to the date of the referendum. This is a way of saying that “I don’t dance to your time—for a certain time, at least. But I can measure it out for you, if you’re willing to pay, I’ll time it with a stopwatch…and I’ll sell you clocks, I’ll guard your paintings, rings, diamonds…if anyone experienced severe claustrophobia from the past, Switzerland could offer them temporary asylum. A shelter.”
As G.G. tells the story, he begins to wonder if Gaustine might be a creature of his own imagination: “I don’t recall when exactly he started to become more real than me.“ The doubling of author and narrator, narrator and character is memorialized in a quote from Borges and I: “I do not know which of us has written this page.”
Near the end, in an echo of Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police, the narrator is losing words, even letters; his thoughts shuffle backwards until his childhood seems much more real to him than the recent past. “Somewhere,” he says, “the past exists as a house or a street that you’ve left for a short while, for five minutes, and you’ve found yourself in a strange city. … The past is my home country. The future is a foreign country full of strange faces, I won’t set foot there.” This astonishing book, which reads like a hymn to the end of the world, is so stuffed with quotable aphorisms that I could hardly keep up.
Trust by Hernan Diaz (Riverhead Books, 2022)
This novel, which shares the 2023 Pulitzer Prize with Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, is divided into four overlapping novellas ostensibly written by four different people. The opening story, “Bonds,” recalls a favorite novel of mine, Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World. In seeking to form his daughter’s brilliant mind, Leopold Brevoort succumbs to the study of strange, occult practices and dubious theologies; soon, he speaks a nonsense made of fragments of various languages, and his writing becomes a series of meaningless symbols. Meanwhile, Leopold’s daughter Helen develops almost supernatural intellectual powers—she can recite passages from memory after hearing them once, even alternating line by line between two poems or tracts, forward or backwards, a parlor trick that her mother exploits to her social advantage. On the eve of the Great War, the impoverished family removes to Europe to depend on the kindness of wealthy friends. As Helen walks alone for the first time in a silent town, she makes a discovery about herself. “She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.” The Brevoorts are extracted from Europe as the fighting begins by a wealthy and pompous young man who serves as the romantic envoy of a reclusive New York financier, leaving the now-addled father behind in a Swiss sanitorium. {Hint at Helen’s illness.}
That last aside of mine is an allusion to the second novella, “My Life,” purporting to be Andrew Bevel’s self-serving memoir of his career as a wealthy financier whose market manipulations may have induced the crash of 1929. His story, which is heavily salted with such editorial notes as “give two or three examples,” is eerily similar to the story of “Bonds”—but the names and point of view have changed, along with the details of the illness that takes Andrew’s wife Helen—or, rather, Mildred. Here, the brilliant Helen becomes docile and childlike. As Bevel writes of his wife’s final illness, he reminds himself to include “[examples] of Mildred’s innocent wisdom during this period. Her thoughts on nature and God. Our last walk in the woods. Sweet incident with an animal.” This is a breathtaking risk for a writer in that the second novella often reads like amateurish drivel. But the risk is calculated—and, in my view, wildly successful. Bevel’s omissions always reveal his personal failings, along with the lies he is telling himself.
A woman named Ida Partenza takes over the story in “A Memoir, Remembered.” After a successful career as a novelist, Ida returns in her old age to the former Central Park home of Andrew Bevel at 87th and Fifth, which is now a museum. As a young woman, Ida applied for a job as a typist turned amanuensis turned ghostwriter– an occupation she will keep secret from her anarchist father, who works as a typesetter, and her indifferent boyfriend, a failed journalist. When Bevel asks Ida why she wants the job, she surprises herself by replying that money is “the universal commodity by which we measure all other commodities. And if money is the god among commodities, this…is its high temple.”
Ida’s main task in drafting Bevel’s memoir is to refute what Bevel believes is the libelous portrait of his wife and family in “Bonds,” a popular novel loosely based on his life. Ida begins by reading Vanner’s book, and her reaction might well be an expression of the aesthetic of Trust: “It was my first time reading something that existed in a vague space between the intellectual and the emotional. Since that moment I have identified that ambiguous territory as the exclusive domain of literature. … Lucidity, [Vanner] seemed to suggest, is the best hiding place for deeper meaning…. Vanner gave me my first glimpse of that elusive region between reason and feeling and made me want to chart it in my own writing.” But in an effort to align reality with his own preference, Bevel is determined to destroy all remembrance, not just of the offending book, but of its author, Harold Vanner. “For the first time,” Ida says, ‘it occurred to me that I should be afraid.”
Ida develops a troubling loyalty to her unrepentant capitalist employer even as she attempts to uncover the real Mildred Bevel, a task at which she only partly succeeds. Despite Bevel’s admonitions, Ida sneaks into Mildred’s room: “there was a monastic sort of calm here—what, in retrospect, I recognize as a modern, austerely avant-garde atmosphere.” At the library, Ida gains access to some of Mildred’s papers. But there is “something runic” about Mildred’s handwriting, and to unpack this code, Ida must draw on the skills of reading forward and backward that were first attributed to Helen Brevoort in “Bonds.” She tells her father that, as a typist, she “had come to experience time differently. The word I was typing was always in the past while the word I was thinking of was always in the future, which left the present oddly uninhabited. He could relate to this: as he fed one piece of type into the composing stick, he was always spotting the nick and face of the next one. … He also told me the biggest influence of his work in his life had been that it had taught him to see the world backward.” Ida finds Mildred’s blotting paper: “I thought of my father and his inverted truth.”
The final entry in the book is “Futures,” a slim journal Mildred kept during her final illness. Here, Ida discovers the secret that Andrew Bevel so desperately sought to conceal in the memoir she wrote for him. Trust is in large part a critique of capital and its monstrous effect on its most devoted adherents. But it is also the story of a brilliant woman whose true essence eludes all the people who claim to love her.
Joan Elizabeth Bauer 