Reading this book felt like I was acquiring a taste for radishes, but in 300 pages instead of 30 years.

It begins as a fairly organized and straightforward first-person narrative about our narrator’s project building “time shelters” to counter memory disorders such as Alzheimer’s and dementia.

But it suddenly departs for a jumpy and philosophical exploration into time, specifically the past and past memory, on an individual and global scale, mixed in with the narrator himself slowly unraveling to his own memory disorder.

Gospodinov’s prose is more poetic than narrative, and once I accepted the book as a meditative and mental exercise rather than a progressing story, I began to appreciate the microscopic insights that Gospodinov makes into how humanity and human identity is built around individual and shared temporal memories and experiences.

I’m struggling to find any words that communicate the experience of reading this book. It is most certainly not a palette cleanser, but it isn’t a dreary malaise either. It exists in this metaphysical plane of philosophical inquiry threaded around a quest for understanding within the story as it is presented but also within the narrator (and by extension the author, as the line between the two seems blurry at best).

I’m not sure who I would recommend this book to. Slightly academic, but not snobby, with a lot of time spent alluding to various revolutions and socio-political movements and disasters of the 20th century across Europe, viewed through a lens of hardened post-Soviet Eastern European malaise.