Time Shelter
A clinic for Alzheimer's patients recreates past decades room by room. As patients retreat into the past, the entire European continent follows, and the novel becomes a meditation on nostalgia and Europe's self-destructive political longing for a past that never quite existed.
A persistent complaint describes a mismatch between admiration and feeling. One reader “admired the skill of the author but never managed to feel involved”, and another says flatly, “I wanted a bit more soul”. Several readers describe the book as overstretched, one calling it “a short story with potential stretched out of proportion”. More than one reader says they “never felt there was a human connection” once the premise of decades as literal places got established, and several add that the back half restates the same idea past the point of real interest, tipping from ambitious into padded.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
