20 saturday review Saturday April 30 2022 | the timesA warning to Europe — and Putin
women on the verge Emilie Pine’s novel is tough and tenderbooks
RUTH CONNOLLYT
here is a moment in middle age
when you seem surprised to dis-
cover that what awaits you on
the horizon of the rest of your
life is not new experiences and
adventures. What is crashing towards you
like a building wave is merely the conse-
quences of your previous behaviour and
decisions. And here it all comes.
This is how we find Ruth in Emilie Pine’s
debut novel, Ruth & Pen. At one point Ruth
had dreams of a family, children with her
husband, Aidan, and a successful inde-
pendent practice as a therapist. Instead,
rushing towards her are all the consequen-
ces of her past decisions: she is childless,A young eco-activist
and an unloved wife
face their fears over a
day in Dublin. Review
by Jessa Crispin
Ruth & Pe n
by Emilie PineHamish Hamilton,
256pp; £14.99What’s the worst
crisis — midlife
or climate?
her husband has decided not to return
from a work trip abroad, and “trying again”
or starting over feels impossible.
Ruth’s story is interspersed with Pen’s, a
teenager who is just starting to make the
decisions and mistakes that will establish
how the rest of her life will go. Pen likes
Alice, but she’s not sure Alice likes girls,
and instead of just telling her and facing re-
jection, she plans an elaborate day to-
gether, going from an environmental ac-
tivists’ protest, to dinner, to a concert.
Pen wants what everyone else wants —
love, a meaningful life — but is struggling
to figure out how to get that in a world not
built by or for her. A world possibly even
against her — she is autistic, gay and over-
sensitive. She overthinks and is overstimu-
lated by everything and is quite an inter-
esting creation.
We meet these two women at crisis
points and follow them over the course of
one day in Dublin. Ruth and Pen meet up
twice by accident as Ruth’s more settled life
is inconvenienced by the young protesters
who will probably never have a chance atan existence as stable as hers. They are
struggling to start lives with problems that
will be bigger than why their husband
didn’t come home. That tension between
the generations is well drawn.
Ruth & Pen, being a first novel, has some
mis-steps despite having a confident and
spare prose style that is like a less severe
Rachel Cusk or a better crafted Sally
Rooney. Pen is hyper-aware and fixated on
the environmental crisis. She knows it will
have a tremendous impact on her life —
it has the potential to crash the global
economy and cause mass death and
displacement.
It is smart to have a young character who
is trying to figure out her sexuality while
being oppressed by the knowledge that
every time she likes her crush’s posts on In-stagram she is releasing carbon into the at-
mosphere and making the world worse.
The problem is that Pine, who wrote
Notes to Self, a well-received collection of
essays about modern womanhood, does
not elegantly incorporate the knowledge
of the growing calamity into her prose.
Instead, long sections of statistics about
disappearing ice and the collapse in insect
populations are stuck in as awkwardly as if
they had been cut and pasted from an
activist’s pamphlet. It’s a shame, given
Pine’s ability to take this knowledge to in-
teresting places.
Also half of the book works less well
than the other. A crumbling marriage, the
emotional weight of infertility and a mid-
life crisis are all well worn tropes and Pine
doesn’t offer enough to prevent Ruth’s side
of things from dragging in the middle. She
is much more successful with her tale of
Pen, an anxious woman in the throes of
young love. The juxtaposition between
their lives does work, but Ruth is a little
thinly drawn as a generic “middle-aged
woman”. Yet what breathes life into Ruth &
Pen is the resolution — or the lack thereof.
What each of them thought they were
going to have, or at least was what they
wanted, proves elusive and they must
adapt. They must learn to let go of resent-
ment and disappointment to avoid getting
stuck or bitter.
There’s something lovely and tough in
Ruth & Pen and ultimately something
unexpected. Pine may be working with
narratives that have become clichés, the
midlife crisis and the coming of age tale,
but she brings them back to life by being
flexible. She finds the same strength as her
characters, looking at the world as it is
rather than cursing it for all it no longer is.
In that there is grace.ultimately to induce whole nations to re-
enact their favourite historical eras. “The
more a society forgets,” Gaustine observes,
“the more someone produces, sells, and
fills the freed-up niches with ersatz-mem-
ory... The past made from light materials,
plastic memory as if spit out by a 3D printer.”
This is not a realist novel. It is a genre-
busting novel of ideas. This is a book about
memory, how it fades and how it is re-
stored, even reinvented, in the imagina-
tions of addled individuals and the civic
discourse of nations.
As the clinic’s grandest schemes bear
fruit, there’s political satire of the slapstick
kind, as when “one day the president of a
central European country went to work in
the national costume. Leather boots, tight
pants, an embroidered vest, a small black
bow above a white shirt, and a black bowl-
er hat with a red geranium.” The passage in
which a huge Bulgarian flag is dropped
over the crowds in Sofia’s oldest park is a
fine piece of comic invention.
As the dream of European unity frays,
and each European country embraces
what it imagines (and votes) to be its best
self — the French, for instance, fall in love
with De Gaulle all over again — Gospodi-
nov’s notes on national character and his-
torical determinism threaten to swallow
the book. However, in a development that
the reader will welcome, our narrator flees
time-torn Bulgaria (divided between com-
placent Soviet nerds and keen re-enactors
of an unsuccessful national uprising in
1876), finds himself a cheap cell in a Fran-
ciscan monastery outside Zurich, and
comes face to face with his burgeoningdementia. “The great leaving is upon you,”
he announces, sliding from first person
into second, and from second into third, as
his mind comes apart.
Gospodinov chillingly describes the
process of mental ageing: “Long, lonely
manoeuvres, waiting, more like trench
warfare, lying in wait, hiding out, quick
sorties, prowling the battlefield ‘between
the clock and the bed’, as one of the elderly
Munch’s final self-portraits is called.”.
So what, exactly, is Gospodinov trying to
do? Gospodinov, right, is one of
those writers who thinks
that novels can, and per-
haps should, contain
more than just a
story. Notes, for ex-
ample. Political ob-
servations. Passa-
ges of philosophy.
Diary entries.
Quotations.
The narrator
comes back re-
peatedly to Thomas
Mann’s polyphonic
novel The Magic
Mountain, but he could
just as easily have cited
Robert Musil, James Joyce or in-
deed Milan Kundera, whose mash-ups of
story, essay and memoir (sometimes
mashed even further by poor translation)
bowled readers over in the 1980s.
The risk with a project like this is that it
slips fiction’s tracks and becomes nothing
more than an overlong London Review
of Books article, a boutique window dis-playing Gospodinov’s cultural capital:
“Ooh! Look! Edvard Munch! And over
there — Primo Levi!” A treasure trove for
quotation-hunters.
Happily for the book, Vladimir Putin’s
attack on Ukraine has saved Time Shelter
from this hostile reading. In its garish light,
Gospodinov’s fanciful and rambling medi-
tation on midlife crisis, crumbling mem-
ory and historical re-enactment acquires a
more pointed, political meaning.
The Europe depicted here — compla-
cent about its future, sentimental
about its past and intimidat-
ed by the globalised
present — is the
Europe Putin imag-
ined he went to war
with when he in-
vaded Ukraine.
In spouting that
disgusting dog-
gerel about Ukro-
nazis, it’s clear Pu-
tin feels he can
twist European his-
tory at will.
As it turns out,
though, Europeans may
not be quite so in thrall to
their own past as Putin hoped or
Gospodinov feared. This lends to Time
Shelter something of the warning quality
of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
His vision of tomorrow is the nightmare
from which Europe knows it must awake.
And accident, in combination with
the book’s own merits, may just have
created a classic.T
he Bulgarian novelist Georgi
Gospodinov has terrific fun in
Time Shelter creating the world’s
first “clinic for the past”. Here,
previous ages (eg 1980s Soviet
Sofia) are recreated to relieve clientele
from the symptoms of senile dementia.
The bald premise here isn’t as fanciful as
it might sound. I assume that, while writ-
ing, Gospodinov was all over news stories
about the Alexa nursing home in Dresden,
which in 2017 built two “memory rooms”
— mocked-up spaces that give the feel of
life in communist-era East Germany — as
a form of therapy.
The unnamed narrator is hired to be an
assistant to Gaustine, the boss of the clinic
and a lugubrious acquaintance who can
travel through time (or would very much
like you to think he can). This time-jumping
chancer has cropped up before, most
memorably in Gospodinov’s 2012 novel
The Physics of Sorrow and in his 2001 col-
lection And Other Stories.
Soon, carers and hangers-on, even the
narrator’s father, are hankering to stay at
the clinic, while Gaustine dreams up grand
plans — to build time clinics in every town;
to build whole towns set in the past; andWhat would happen if
we could escape from
our troubling era into
a ‘clinic for the past’?
Simon Ings finds out
Time Shelter
by Georgi Gospodinov,
trans. Angela RodelWeidenfeld & Nicolson,
304pp; £16.99about its pa
ed by
presen
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ineo thinks
d per-
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aic
agic
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s Joyce or in-
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As
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not be quit
ttheir own past a
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