So, noon for Gospodinov is a time of boredom, memories, some kind of weightless loneliness – and now a time of grief. The carefree days of childhood meet the fatherless days of late middle age, and the orphaned son risks being buried in them.
All of Gospodinov’s work is tied to time and outside of time, pursued by time and fleeing from it. The past always calls us back, but stories are made up of our journeys and returns to the past. The Odyssey, Gospodinov suggests in one of the mini-essays in Shelter of Time, is in fact a story about returning to the past. And the past “is not at all abstract, it consists of very concrete, small things.” His narrators – never too different from the author himself – delight in exploring their childhoods in Sovietized Bulgaria in the seventies and eighties, comparing this artificially ossified world with modern consumerist Europe. These studies are careful, tender, tangible: buildings and radios, cars and first kisses, songs and streets – everything comes to life in memory. Faced with a choice between erotic immortality with the nymph Calypso and returning to Ithaca, Odysseus chooses the latter—not only because of Penelope and Telemachus, “but also because of something concrete and trivial, which he called the smoke of the hearth, because of the memory of the smoke of the hearth rising from the house of his ancestors.” From Ithaca's garden to his father's garden, Gospodinov moves from mythical soil to mortal soil.
Homer's story, the author adds, is also “a book about the search for a father.” So, the father – although, of course, not only the father; in someone else's book mother—is the past: he holds it on his shoulders, like Atlas, and to lose a parent means to lose part of this past, part of that tangible world. Continuing the thread of his previous work, Gospodinov returns in his new book to Homer. Towards the end of the Odyssey, having landed on Ithaca, Odysseus goes to visit his elderly father and finds him working in the garden – a scene that worries both Odysseus and the narrator Gospodinov. “Seeing Laertes, crushed by old age and grief,” writes Gospodinov, “Odysseus hides behind a deciduous tree and bursts into tears.” Odysseus tells his father that he keeps a good garden but does not take care of himself – “obviously what all sons say to their fathers.”
Through memories of his late father, Gospodinov's narrator once again returns to the Bulgarian past, which now extends beyond his own childhood, through several lost generations. My father was a great storyteller, a chain smoker (“learned to smoke from the films of the fifties and sixties”) and, above all, a great gardener. One of his last jobs before the fall of socialism was as a gardener and occupational therapy coordinator at a remote psychiatric clinic. “He tended the garden with the sick – the mentally ill, alcoholics, drug addicts. They planted tomatoes, cabbage, peppers, flowers.” Gardening was also my father's therapy. Wherever he lived, he turned his small plot of land into a garden. Seventeen years ago he almost died of cancer and gardening saved his life; he made the little desert of his backyard bloom. He spoke through the garden, “and his words were apples and cherries and big red tomatoes.” The son loved to visit him, especially in the spring, “burying his head among the branches of a thickly blooming plum tree, closing his eyes and listening to the zen buzz of the bees.”
