Last month, during a one week trip to London, I spent around three hours happily immersed in several multi-screen presentations of Isaac Julien’s films at the ‘What Freedom Means To Me’ exhibition at Tate Britain.
The film that made the biggest impression on me was ‘Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement’ from 2019, based around the life of the Italian-Brazilian modernist architect who died in 1992 aged 78. If you want to know what dancing about architecture looks like, you should watch this!
Bo Bardi is played by two actresses, movingly contrasting her as a young and older woman. The older self is played by Brazilian stage, television and film actress Fernanda Montenegro who, at the end of the film, recites lines from Bo Bardi’s correspondence in the form of a poem: “Linear time is a western invention. Time is not linear, it is a marvellous entanglement, where at any moment, points can be chosen and solutions invented, without beginning or end.”
These words resonated with me and I think subconsciously prompted me to purchase a copy of Time Shelter (Времеубежище) by Georgi Gospodinov which was on prominent display in Foyles Bookshop as the winner of this year’s International Booker Prize . The novel was translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel and is Gospodinov’s third novel to be published in English.
It proved to be a fortuitous choice. This is a brilliant novel of ideas about time and memory. It is playful , poignant and fiercely topical in the way it shows how individual perceptions of the past, present and future are fundamental to an understanding of the human condition.
For those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia, death is preceded by a gradual decline in memory. In the novel Guastine, the only named character, opens a clinic that replicates the past for those suffering from this disease. Patients are consoled in this time shelter, likened to a “warm cave”, by being able to literally live in the past. They are surrounded by sounds and visions from that period so that mind is not traumatised by anything of the present.
So successful is this project is that those not suffering from dementia come to find the idea of retreating into the past an attractive prospect. Gospodinov has spoken of being influenced by the wave of populism sweeping the world. He has obviously noted how political opportunists gain support by selling both an imaginary view of the past and a mythical vision of the future. Brexit is mentioned a prime example of this alongside the caveat that “when you have no future, you vote for the past”. Nations are described as “a group of people who have agreed to jointly remember and forget the same things.”
The novel made me reflect that, if it were possible to recreate the past, we could have the satisfaction of eliminating painful or embarrassing experiences. In this way, idealised personal histories could follow the lines of the song ‘The Way We Were’ written by Alan Bergman / Marilyn Bergman / Marvin Hamlisch: “Memories may be beautiful and yet/What’s too painful to remember/We simply choose to forget”.
Gospodinov imagines the possibility of citizens from around the world being able to vote in a ‘Referendum On The Past’ to choose which decade they would prefer to live in. The author makes some wise comments on how history works, noting that happiness doesn’t make it into textbooks because the primary focus is on wars, conflicts and upheaval. He also reflects on the impossibility of truly understanding the world from our present time experience since hindsight determines which events or trends are truly momentous and significant: “Everything happens years after it happened”.
Ultimately, the lines Gospodinov quotes from W.H.Auden’s poem September 1st 1939 stand as a sobering reminder to individuals who nurse idealised dreams of the future and/or for whom the flames of memory still burn brightly : “There is no such thing as the State / And no one exists alone / Hunger allows no choice / To the citizen or the police/ We must love one another or die.”
