Time Shelter

A Bulgarian writer, referred to throughout as G.G., opens by reflecting on humanity's obsession with fixing time, citing the seventeenth-century Irish bishop James Ussher's calculation that the earth was created on October 22, 4004 BC, and declaring that on September 1, 1939, "early in the morning, came the end of human time." This date becomes the novel's recurring anchor as G.G. recounts his entanglement with Gaustine, a mysterious figure he claims to have first invented as a literary character and later met in the flesh.

G.G. introduces Gaustine through a newspaper article about a doctor at a geriatric clinic in the Vienna Woods who decorated his office in 1960s style and noticed that patients with memory disorders became calmer and more talkative. G.G. tracks down the clinic, discovers the doctor has resigned, and recognizes the nameplate being removed: The doctor is Gaustine.

G.G. recounts their first meeting at a literary seminar by the seaside in the late 1980s. Gaustine, a solitary young man who lives in an abandoned house and sells old objects to survive, offers G.G. cigarettes from 1937 and speaks of the Hindenburg disaster as though he had witnessed it. His name fuses Augustine and Garibaldi, reflecting his parents' conflicting aspirations. After the seminar, the two exchange letters. Gaustine writes as if living in 1929, referencing that year's newspapers. Years later, a final letter arrives dated August 14, 1939: Gaustine announces his mother is Jewish, references Kristallnacht, the November 1938 pogrom against Jewish communities across Nazi Germany, and declares he is fleeing to New York. G.G. notes simply, "Today is September 1," collapsing the two dates.

Years pass before G.G. finds Gaustine again, through a chance encounter in a Zurich café with Mr. S., an elderly Bulgarian émigré whose father was sent to a labor camp after Bulgaria's communist takeover in 1944. At parting, Mr. S. mentions a fellow Bulgarian who has started "a little clinic of the past." G.G. recognizes this as Gaustine's work.

G.G. visits the clinic on Heliosstrasse in Zurich, housed on the top floor of an apricot-colored building overlooking the lake. Inside, Gaustine has transformed an apartment into a fully re-created middle-class 1960s dwelling. A coat on the entryway rack is identical to G.G.'s mother's, and for a moment he is transported back to childhood. Gaustine explains his vision: If it is 1965 inside a patient's head, the external environment should match. He recruits G.G. as a collector of the past, a gatherer of scents, stories, and everyday details to populate the clinic's rooms.

G.G. becomes a "trapper of the past," traveling and cataloging the sensory traces of different decades. He discovers that the past hides above all in the quality of afternoon light and in scents, for which no recording device exists besides language itself. He simultaneously works on a novel about the past, and the two projects merge until he can no longer distinguish what is real from what he has invented.

The novel presents several patient stories illustrating how memory loss reshapes identity. Mircea, from the Romanian town of Turnu Măgurele, remembers only the American life he dreamed of under socialism. Mr. N., who has lost his memory to retrograde amnesia, turns to the secret agent who once surveilled him as the only person who can reconstruct his erased past. Mrs. Sh., a Holocaust survivor, becomes hysterical at the sight of showers, prompting Gaustine and G.G. to restructure her environment. Hilde, a German-Bulgarian woman, arrives with an empty gaze but comes alive when she sees a wooden radio with a dial of city names, reading them aloud in Bulgarian and recounting her traumatic 1944 childhood.

The clinic expands into a multi-floor operation organized by decade, with separate zones for the Eastern Bloc past divided by a locked gate mimicking the Iron Curtain. A former long-distance runner living in the 1970s section reads reprinted 1979 newspapers and becomes emotionally invested in John Lennon's life, eventually escaping over the fence to warn the outside world. After police return him, the Runaway tells other residents that the modern world, with its smartphones and earbuds, looks like an unconvincing futuristic experiment.

G.G. opens a Bulgarian branch of the clinic. In its 1970s neighborhood, he watches a rebroadcast of the 1978 World Cup final with his cognitively impaired father and echoes words his father once told him as a boy: "Look, old man, life is more than a single loss." His father's lips move, mouthing "Old man," their shared password. It is their last real exchange. G.G. later takes his father to Gaustine's Swiss clinic, where his father dies. G.G. lights a period cigarette and watches his father's nostrils twitch in recognition before he goes quiet.

Gaustine, increasingly consumed by what G.G. likens to Ahab's blind pursuit of the white whale, envisions entire cities and countries set in specific decades. The novel then shifts into speculative territory. Across Europe, people begin dressing in national costumes, and what starts as eccentricity becomes soft tyranny. Three powerful European officials visit Gaustine and propose a continent-wide referendum: Each EU member-state will vote on which decade of the twentieth century to return to. G.G. and Gaustine part tensely, with G.G. accusing Gaustine of playing with the past and Gaustine retorting that G.G. needs someone to do what he does not dare.

G.G. returns to Bulgaria, where the nation is split between two main referendum movements: the Movement for State Socialism, seeking a return to the 1960s and 1970s, and the Bulgarian Heroes, championing an idealized nineteenth-century Bulgarian Revival. At the Soc demonstration, a rebuilt mausoleum of communist leader Georgi Dimitrov rises as the centerpiece. At the Heroes' rally, a massive flag carried by drones collapses onto the crowd when participants shoot the drones down with old rifles. The referendum produces a near-tie, and the two movements form a coalition that withdraws Bulgaria from the European Union, proclaiming a path toward national purity. G.G. flees the next day; the borders close shortly after.

From a Franciscan monastery near Zurich, G.G. tracks results across Europe. France chooses the early 1980s; Spain picks the 1980s for La Movida Madrileña, the cultural explosion after Franco; Scandinavia settles on the 1970s. The Czech Republic chooses the 1990s, Poland the early 1980s for the birth of the Solidarity trade union, and Romania the late 1960s. Germany picks the 1980s, though in eastern provinces a far-right party associated with the 1930s places second. Switzerland selects the referendum date itself as its "past," choosing temporal neutrality. Italy claims the 1960s, returning to the era of Fellini and Vespas.

Gaustine disappears, leaving G.G. a postcard from the New York Public Library: "I need to go to 1939, I'll write when I get there." The aftermath is chaotic. Those who lost the referendum form enclaves set in their preferred decades, and road maps become time maps. In Sarajevo, a reenactment of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's 1914 assassination turns deadly when blank rounds prove to be live ammunition, killing the actor playing the archduke. Europe teeters on the edge of what G.G. calls "a second First World War."

G.G.'s own memory deteriorates. He retreats to the monastery and fills in Gaustine's yellow notebook until their handwriting becomes indistinguishable. Gaustine's notes propose that "God has dementia," that the world exists in the uncertain memory of a deity who has begun to forget. G.G. meditates on Lot's wife, arguing she was punished not for disobedience but for being human, unable to abandon the past. In the epilogue, G.G. admits he no longer knows whether Gaustine was real or imagined, whether the clinic existed or was just a note in a notebook. The final numbered chapter, labeled "0," describes the eve of a massive military reenactment of September 1, 1939. The last line reads: "Tomorrow was September 1," collapsing past and future into a single sentence. The novel closes with meaningless typewriter keystrokes from G.G.'s childhood, a code that will never be cracked.