Time Shelter is one of those rare novels that begin with an almost simple, even tender idea and gradually allow it to grow into something vast and disturbing. Gaustine, an enigmatic “traveller in time,” opens a clinic in Zurich for people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Each floor meticulously recreates a different decade of the twentieth century, with its furniture, newspapers, music, smells and everyday objects. If the present is disappearing, perhaps the patient can still inhabit a past in which memory survives.

Then Gospodinov makes the decisive leap: what if those rooms were desired not only by people who have lost the present, but also by those who simply no longer wish to live in it?

The past becomes first a refuge, then a commodity, a collective obsession and finally a political project. Europe begins to ask itself not what future it should build, but which past it would prefer to return to. Nations hold referendums to choose their ideal historical period, and nostalgia ceases to be a private longing for what has been lost: it becomes ideology.

This is where Time Shelter becomes both extraordinarily funny and deeply unsettling. Gospodinov understands that nostalgia has two faces. For an individual it can offer consolation, identity, even therapy; for a society it can become falsification. The past we long for is rarely the past that actually existed. It is selected, edited, purified and reconstructed through personal and collective memory.

The novel’s great achievement lies in the way it constantly widens its perspective, moving from the fragile memory of a single human being to the memory of an entire continent. Gospodinov can be melancholy without becoming sentimental, philosophical without becoming didactic, and comic while describing something profoundly tragic. Behind the absurdity lies an increasingly frightening question: what happens to a civilisation when it loses the ability to desire the future?

Borges can be glimpsed in its temporal labyrinths, Proust in the way objects awaken memory, Thomas Mann in illness transformed into a metaphysical condition, while echoes of Gogol and Bulgakov emerge whenever the absurd quietly invades reality. Yet Gospodinov’s voice remains unmistakably his own: fragmented, ironic, compassionate and haunted by the history of twentieth-century Europe.

In the end, Time Shelter begins almost in a whisper, among people losing their memories, and ends by speaking about all of us. Everyone has a private time shelter: a year, a room, a song, a smell, a person, a world that no longer exists. Gospodinov understands perfectly how human it is to want to return there.

And precisely for that reason, how dangerous it can be to want to remain there.