Imagine for a moment being able to open a door to the past and relive, as if in a setting, the time of your life when you were the happiest.
This is the bottomless pit into which the narrator of Georgy Gospodinov’s third novel falls, The country of the past. Born in 1968, writer of memory, as he had shown in Physics of melancholy (Intervalles, 2015), Gospodinov takes head-on a recent history made up of ruptures, historical rapes, revolutions fallen from the sky and confiscated.
He will find Gaustine, a friend lost sight of for years, an elusive and fascinating gerontologist psychiatrist with whom he shares the same obsession for the past. A true “collector of the past”, a slightly crazy entrepreneur coupled with a philosopher without borders, Gaustine had the idea of opening a “clinic to produce from the past” in Zurich, Switzerland, a country of luxury and boredom, to treat some patients whose memory fails.
“It is no coincidence at all that two discoveries of the XXand century linked precisely to time took place here, precisely, in Switzerland: Einstein’s theory of relativity and The magic mountain by Thomas Mann. For the narrator, Switzerland is a kind of “timeless” country that managed to sneak through the XXand century without the slightest scar. It’s the perfect place to play sorcerer’s apprentice.
By opening the door of the clinic, we fell directly into the XXand century, in the mid-1960s, in a kind of “protected time”, like a real, life-size version of Goodbye, Lenin! or of Back to the future. Patients returned to childhood saw nothing but fire.
Their concept will snowball.
Gradually, the clinics will gain followers, it will be necessary to open branches in other cities and other countries. The experience that was only accessible to patients will also be offered to families, then to the general public. “Insensibly, people in traditional clothes began to conquer the cities. Suddenly, it became awkward to walk around in jeans, a jacket or a suit. »
A veritable epidemic that is spreading across Europe, where a series of national referendums will be held, with each country wanting to return to the happiest decade in its history.
In Bulgaria, where the narrator returns for the occasion, two camps clash, between authentic nostalgia and remote-controlled utopia. On the one hand, those who advocate a return to the so-called blessed era of “developed socialism”, the 1930s to 1970s. On the other, the supporters of National Awakening, tireless dreamers of a “Greater Bulgaria” transcending the ages. We can see there a latent criticism of nationalism – in particular of Bulgarian nationalism. “The less there is of memory, the more there is of the past,” said Gaustine.
Fantastic political novel, bittersweet allegory, The land of the past strikes and fascinates at times, without really delivering all its promises.
Through a narration that takes leaps and bounds, Gospodinov ends up linking moods and digressions. Until gradually leading its reader, in this disconcerting and fascinating novel, towards silence with a wink as mocking as it is frustrating: “The end of a novel is like the end of the world, it is good to to differ. »