Georgi Gospodinov

It says something about a book when the thing you like most is the cover (mine being the 2022 Weidenfeld and Nicolson paperback, a lovely bit of design).
    As for the novel itself, the idea was promising enough: a psychiatrist—lifelong Beatles fan and enthusiast of the 1960s in general—decks out his Viennese office in the style of that decade. From local flea-markets and junk shops he collects original photos and posters for its walls, a genuine ̕60s record-player, vintage cigarette packs, stacks of magazines, and even takes to wearing a 60s-style turtleneck with his white coat. A specialist in geriatric psychiatry, he soon notices that some of his patients, particularly those in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, sort of linger in his office and become noticeably more relaxed and communicative. A new kind of therapy takes shape: “If it’s 1965 in your head, the year when you were twenty…then let the outside world, at least in the confines of a single room, be 1965 too…they’ll start telling stories, remembering things, even though some of them haven’t said a word in months.”
    In Zurich a “clinic of the past” is fitted out, each floor a throwback (wallpaper, furniture, ornaments, everything) to a different decade—1940s on the ground floor, then up through the ̕50s, ̕60s, ̕70s, ̕80s and ̕90s at the top—to help patients of various ages and degrees of memory-loss. Things go well at first too, but then rapidly get out of hand: the idea spreads to the general population, to people everywhere who want to swap the present day for their own particular idea of the best time to have been alive; all over Europe the past begins to encroach on the present. The theme is this obsession with history—with traditions, nostalgia, commemoration, nationalism, all that wretched flag-waving and marching about—and the wish to turn the clock back even to times and places which in reality were unpleasant, ghastly, in some cases inhuman.
    Such a promising idea (and timely, given what’s happening in Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East) but I was left feeling the author could have done so much more with it than he did.… (mais)