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“Time feeds on us. We are food for time.��

Reading Time Shelter is like spending a series of afternoons �� sun-soaked, languid, in dappled shade �� in the company of an astute mind, pondering the Big Questions: time, memory, history, aging, death.

The concept: Two characters (one real, one possibly imagined) establish a “clinic of the past�� for Alzheimers and dementia patients. The clinic recreates specific decades of the past on different floors (such as the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s) by emulating the furniture, the songs, the slang, the news, the general mood of the era. The idea is to create temporal “safe spaces�� to help patients with memory loss synchronize their internal and external time:

“For us, the past is the past, and even when we step back into it, we know that the exit to the present is open, we can come back with ease. For those who have lost their memories, this door has slammed shut once and for all. For them, the present is a foreign country, while the past is their homeland.��

To support his work at the clinic, the narrator becomes a “trapper�� of the past. He travels the world, gathering scents and afternoons, archiving them:

“Over the years, I’ve realized that the past tends to hide above all in two places �� in afternoons (in the way the light falls) and in scents. That’s where I laid my traps.��

Why do scents trigger our earliest memories? Why don’t we have name for scents, in the same way we have names for colours? And why is the recollection of scents the last to leave the “empty den of memory��? These are some of the questions the narrator explores along the way.

Over time, the “clinic of the past�� project becomes so successful that it is forced to open to a wider set of clients �� citizens who do not feel “at home�� in the present day. Entire neighbourhoods and towns join the experiment. Eventually, countries hold “referendums on the past�� as part of a large-scale historical reenactment project:

“It’s simple. When you have no future, you vote for the past.��

Parts of the novel read as a critique of modern politics which weaponizes nostalgia in an effort to sell a specific agenda. It highlights, in particular, the unfairness of having aging populations dictate the futures of those not yet born:

“The aging chose the years of their youth, yet the young, who were not even born then, would have to live in those years. There was a certain injustice in that �� choosing the time the next generation would live in. As happens in all elections, actually.��

This is not a book big on character or plot or place. It is a novel of ideas, in conversation with the greats �� Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, Jorge Luis Borges�� Borges and I, to name just a few.

To me, reading this book was a unique form of therapy. An invitation to reflect on my own past, to remember the forgotten objects and “unhappened�� events of my childhood. A summons, too, to enter the clockwork of time, to defuse it, to slow it down. A subtle sense, even, that we live in a simulation, and that we can notice the “cracks through which the light of the past streams in��, if only we pay attention. Although the novel wasn’t perfect �� it can feel at times unruly, meandering, chaotic �� I personally loved spending time in the shelter of its pages.

Mood: Metaphysical
Rating: 9/10
Awards: Shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2023, and the EBRD Literature Prize 2023

Also .

Soundtrack to the novel
�� Doors��
�� Eagles��
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�� Messiaen’s
�� The Beatles'